By Jennifer Eisenbart
Editor
For every picture that Alfred Watson took, there is a story.
His daughter, Carol, seems to know all of them.
For example, there is the picture called “Sick Child,” where a woman – a mother – covers her face in her arms, her sick child in a crib feet away.
Al Watson traveled with a visiting nurse group following the Depression, and this picture was one of many he took. His daughter said the woman is hiding her face because she was ashamed at the poverty she and her child suffered in.
“People just didn’t have money,” said Carol. “(My father) remembered how cold it was in there. He went outside and cried.”
Starting with a $1 “Brownie” camera – one issued in 1930 by Kodak Company to celebrate their 50th anniversary – Albert Watson literally took thousands of photos in his time to find the one or two photos that were stunning.
And in those thousands of photos, he had more than 1,100 accepted of 130 different prints that he made over the years. Most were black and white, some were color, a few were sepia-toned.
In all, though, those 1,000-plus accepted submissions – to various exhibitions all over the world – earned him a five-star exhibitor award from the Photographic Society of America.
Just some of those photos will be on display at The Coffee House at Chestnut and Pine starting on Monday.
Carol Watson watched her father slowly decline and eventually die in 2003 from Alzheimer’s disease. What she was left with was a lifetime of work by an amateur photographer who started with a cheap camera that he got because his sister didn’t want it.
The Kodak cameras were given to 12-year-olds across the country in 1930. Albert was 14, but his sister had no interest in photography.
“That’s how he started, with that little camera,” explained Carol. “He just had an eye. The composition, he seemed to have that ability.”
Over the years, Carol’s father grabbed pictures of everything from itinerant farm workers to poverty-stricken families suffering through the Great Depression.
When World War II became a reality in the United States, Albert Watson could not serve because of a hearing problem. Instead, he studied, and eventually became a chemical engineer.
The photography hobby, though, continued to grow, as did his family. In fact, Carol is the subject of one of her father’s award-winning shots – much to her chagrin.
The picture, called “Forsaken,” was taken after her father scolded her while trying to get her to sit on a stool for a photo that might reflect the song, “Forsaken Am I.”
Carol didn’t want to cooperate, and her father took away the light bulb she was playing with. The resulting look on her face won her father the award.
At age 3, she remembers none of this.
“My sister is, ‘Oh, you were just being your normal self,” Carol recalled. “I loved my father tremendously. He was tremendously patient.”
In a time where photographers still worked in darkrooms – with machines, printing paper and chemicals – that patience turned into a virtue. Carol remembered sitting in the darkroom with her father, with the “magic red light,” her father burning and dodging photos for effect.
“It’s the old-fashioned ways,” said Carol, who hopes to eventually find someone with a darkroom. She still owns all her father’s negatives, and wants to make reprints the “old-fashioned way.” Digital reprints, she said, lose the depth and quality of the images.
In the meantime, she will show her father’s photography off in Burlington, and on a website – Watsonprints.com. His work, reflective of the history that he lived through, she hopes will be important to people other than herself.
“I don’t want him forgotten,” said Carol. “His pictures, so many of them tell a story.
“I don’t want the past to be forgotten,” she added. “We need to remember these things. It’s a different world, but you don’t just forget it.”
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