The Hidden Lane Gallery shows palladium and platinum prints by Margaret Watkins and many of her students at the Clarence White School of Photography in the period 1919-1925.

The School opened in New York in 1914. Watkins attended its Summer Schools and was apprenticed to Alice Boughton, a portrait photographer in Boston, herself taught by the renowned photographer Gertrude Kasebier. Watkins became a full time student around 1917, and within a few years joined the staff. The curriculum for the school included commercial and hand-coated platinum, silver, printing out and gaslight, single and multiple carbon , single and cowhide gum, oil, bromoil and photogravure.

During the First World War the price of platinum rocketed, as it was needed for explosives and ammunition – which multiplied the cost of making platinum prints. This led to the development (by William Willis in 1915) of the palladium process, using a metal closely related to platinum, and creating Palladiotype paper. White, Watkins and others at the school adopted this process.

After her arrival in Glasgow in 1928, Watkins continued to use palladium – but more importantly for the current exhibition, she bequeathed her own photographs and a unique collection of many by her students to her neighbour Joe Mulholland. These show works by known and unknown names; class exercises demonstrating up to ten different treatments of a single image, her hot processes, blue prints, carbon examples and some processes which even the experts are now unclear how the effects were achieved – or what the process was.

Margaret Watkins and the Clarence White School: Palladium and Platinum Prints 1919 – 1925 is part of the Blueprint Photography Festival, along with venues including Trongate 103, Street Level, Glasgow Print Studio, the University of Glasgow, Riverside Museum, the Mitchell Library and RGI Kelly Gallery. The exhibition runs from February 8th until March 12th, 2013.

Arrested by officers of OGPU — the KGB’s predecessor — Margaret Watkins claimed her photographs of their HQ in Moscow were purely to record post-revolutionary Russia. The Glasgow-based photographer was in a group organised by a fellow member of the Royal Photographic Society, through Intourist, the State agency charged with bringing visitors, and foreign currency, to the country.

It was in August 1933 that they set off from a wharf on the Thames near Tower Bridge, London, in the State-owned Cooperatzia. First call was Leningrad, where they were given the ground rules; photograph no bridges, military installations, soldiers’ manoeuvres, public or military buildings — especially not the Kremlin. These could be of use to foreign enemies planning a bombing campaign on the understandably paranoid post-Revolution State. So only the odd soldier in the streets or on stage at a state-run youth rally. Lots of snaps of processions, picturesque windows, interesting characters and blocks of workers’ flats. These latter would show how the Soviet Socialist Republic looked after the proletariat.

One building looked as interesting as the next to Canadian-born Margaret Watkins, who had come to Glasgow in 1928 to visit her maiden aunts in Hyndland, in the house from where her mother had married in 1877. Worker flats were snapped with titles later appended by her, like “Reconstruction” or “Progress”. However, one block proved to be a problem. No sooner had she set up her Graflex camera and clicked a few shots than she was descended on by the security police, and rushed to the secret police headquarters.

Hours of interrogation by junior officials followed and things looked gloomy for her. She explained that she thought the impressive building looked like good workers’ acccommodation. Her camera and films were taken away to be examined. A senior official became involved. She explained again. She was a photographer, following in the footsteps of one of her illustrious pupils, Margaret Bourke-White, who had visited Russia a couple of years before, and produced a six-part series (adulatory, of course) on Russia. The series had been published the previous year in the New York Times magazine, to the great joy of the Russian State propagandists.

Sense prevailed and she was released, with her beloved Graflex — but sans film. All film taken on the trip had to be surrendered to the authorities, who had it developed, inspected and (if found to contain no prohibited images) returned in a sealed envelope. This envelope had to be produced at the port of departure, opened by the Secret Police agent there, and checked against the inventory of approved images that accompanied it.

Margaret Watkins got out of the country with over 600 negatives. She made silver gelatin prints from a small number of these (some to exhibition standard) when she returned to her aunts’ home in Westbourne Gardes in Glasgow’s West End.

Eighteen of her original prints are now on show at the Hidden Lane Gallery in Argyle Street, Finnieston in Glasgow, together with another 80 from the “approved” negatives. These are also silver gelatin prints, made by Glasgow master printer and photographer Robert Burns. Most of these are now printed for the first time.

The Hidden Lane Gallery, at 1081 Argyle Street, Glasgow G3 8LZ, is open Tuesday to Saturday from 11am-5pm (www.hiddenlanegallery.com). The Margaret Watkins “Leningrad and Moscow 1933″ exhibition is on until 6th February 2013.

On until 21 August, 2012

An exhibition gathering together a hundred depictions of Glasgow through the ages by some of the many artists – citizens and visitors alike – who have recorded the changing faces of the city during the past four centuries. Quality prints of most of these will be available to order through the Gallery, or on the website.

Paintings, prints, etchings, photographs, lithographs, drawings (and even needlework and an ancient piece of stained glass of Saint Mungo) showing the changing city over the centuries.

Photographs by Thomas Annan from the 1870’s show the now romanticised squalor of what is today the Merchant City, enlarged by the Annan Gallery in 1926 from the original plates.

Coloured lithographs of the Clyde and the Cathedral from the early and mid 1800’s, and a glimpse of paintings from the Foulis Academy exhibited in the Old University of Glasgow in the High Street in the 1760’s.

A window on the city in the 1930’s as seen through the lens of Margaret Watkins, whose work goes on display in a major exhibition in the National Gallery of Canada in October and a fascinating panorama, drawn from a balloon suspended above the Gorbals and published in the Illustrated London News in 1864 – with detail clearly identifiable around much of the city including Wellington, without his bollard, in place outside the now Gallery of Modern Art.

And lots more.

Until 21st August 2012.

Open Tuesday to Saturday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Hilda Goldwag was born in Vienna in 1912. As an artistically gifted child she attended Art School in her native city and graduated in 1938 with distinction. With the growth of Nazism life became increasingly fraught for anyone of Jewish origin. She got a permit to “escape” to Scotland in 1939, and worked as a domestic servant in a manse in West Linton. Her family were due to follow in September 1939 – the day war broke out. All died in Dachau, including her four year old nephew.

During the war years she worked (as an enemy alien) in factory jobs.

Living in Hill Street, Garnethill, near the Glasgow Art School she had various art related jobs and soon took up painting again. She became a familiar sight with her easel and paints and brushes in the area, and her paintings began to appear in exhibitions. She moved to a low rise flat in Yoker/Knightswood after the Great Storm of 1968 took the roof off her city centre flat.

Painting had become a full-time occupation with solo shows in Greenock and Gourock in the 1970’s , in the Royal Glasgow Institute’s Kelly Gallery in Glasgow, and the Lillie Gallery in Milngavie in the eighties. A major exhibition of her work appeared at the University of Strathclyde’s Collins Gallery in 2005.

She painted until a year or two before her death in January 2008, trailing around the area – the parks and canal banks – with her gear stacked on a supermarket trolley. She ventured out to Kirkintilloch and other spots in bussing distance from Glasgow – returning with her large canvases or boards, the paint still wet, spread on the bus luggage racks.

When she died her little flat was stacked with paintings. Most of these reached auctions – for very successful sales. An exhibition of many of these was mounted at the Hidden Lane Gallery in Argyle Street in Finnieston, in 2010 and achieved considerable interest.

During the show a dustbin man came in to the Gallery and spoke to Gallery director Joe Mulholland. “Are you interested in drawings by Hilda Goldwag?” he enquired.

Mulholland was very interested. The dustbin man told him that he worked “with the Clennie” in the Yoker/Knightswood area and had known the old lady by sight, as she trundled around with her paints and paintings. When emptying the bins at the block of flats where she lived, he saw bags of what looked like interesting stuff among the rubbish. He opened them and found half a dozen sketch books and individual drawings.

“I thought it was a shame to have these destroyed and lost, so I took them home.l”

When he saw Hilda Goldwag’s name on the Hidden Lane Gallery window, it rang a bell. So he brought the sketches and drawings in. Many were simply studies for later paintings. Many were fine drawings able to stand by themselves.

The Gallery gave him a very substantial “reward” for his foresight and appreciation – but he wanted no personal recognition for saving the works. (and some of the painting materials: brushes, palette knives and scrapers) “I would get my books if my bosses found out I had kept these back from the trash”, he said.

The exhibition at the Hidden Lane Gallery shows dozens of these drawings, and the notebooks alongside a representative selection of Hilda Goldwag’s “people” paintings, since most of the drawings and sketches are of people.

The exhibition starts on Saturday 31st March, and is open Tuesdays to Saturdays from 11 am to 5 pm.

MARGARET WATKINS (1884-1969) FORGOTTEN WOMAN, PORTRAITS

Self Portrait, Nude, Grandmother, Untitled (child), Untitled (couple), Portrait in sunlight