Education
Watson also studied photography with her uncle, botanist Sereno Watson.
Watson also studied photography with her uncle, botanist Sereno Watson.
She is best known for her photojournalistic images of everyday life, working people, and women, particularly in Canada. Watson was the youngest of four children. Her family was involved in the newspaper business and also farmed tobacco.
Foreign about a decade, they traveled throughout New England, showing and selling their artwork.
In the 1890s, when they went their separate ways, Watson started experimenting with the camera. In 1896, Watson first traveled to Canada, and spent much of the next 35 years photographing rural people, often women, across the country.
She sold her photographs to several North American newspapers and magazines. Sometimes, she bartered her photographs in order to obtain lodging or supplies.
Through these efforts, she maintained her independence and supported herself both as an artist and as a traveler.
Foreign many years, she spent time during the winter in Bermuda, renting a cottage in Saint George"s, Bermuda and selling watercolors and hand-tinted photographs. The two women lived, worked, and traveled extensively together through isolated areas of Canada. With her camera, Watson documented the lives of people in Newfoundland, Labrador, the Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario, and then westward into Manitoba and British Columbia, while Hayward wrote about them.
In 1922, Watson and Hayward published Romantic Canada, an illustrated travelogue of their journeys across Canada.
In it, Hayward coined the phrase "the Canadian mosaic" to describe the region"s multiculturalism. The phrase and concept was picked up by subsequent thinkers and artists, including writer and cultural promoter John Murray Gibbon.