ROGER WATSON
Roger Watson was born in rural Tennessee and spent his childhood and youth in Detroit. Roger attended Michigan State University where he received a BA in Communications and later a Fine Arts degree in Photographic Arts where he first encountered the history of photography. He began his museum career at the Kresge Art Museum during his last year of studying, staying on for seven years as Chief Assistant to the museum’s director. It was here that he curated his first exhibitions of photographs. After several years of consulting work with various private and institutional collections he returned to the museum world working at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York under the direction of Grant Romer, a world authority on the history of early photography. During his time there Roger curated several exhibitions, wrote numerous articles for photo history journals and helped create the Historic Process Workshops which revived 19th century photographic practices.
Since 2000, Roger has been at the Fox Talbot Museum in the village of Lacock in Wiltshire. Originally there to catalogue the archive of images and manuscript material left by William Henry Fox Talbot, one of the inventors of photography he was also appointed Corresponding Editor for the Talbot Transcription Project based first at University of Glasgow and now at DeMontfort University. In 2007 he was appointed curator of the museum and has overseen the revival of the museum’s exhibition program and brought the Historic Process Workshops to their new home in Lacock.
Roger has acted as an advisor to both Christies and Sotheby’s and consulted for a number of institutional and private collections, his expertise in the early years of photography has made him a sought after speaker. He has written scholarly articles and essays on preservation of early images and on the reception of photography in antebellum America.
Roger lives on a farm in rural Wiltshire and is currently working with the town of Bry-sur-Marne, the home town of Louis Daguerre, on a series of exhibitions and events for 2014 to celebrate the 175th birthday of photography’s announcement, bringing together the homes and museums of the two founders of photography, Fox Talbot and Daguerre for the first time in celebration of the art that changed the world.
His Capturing the Light –The Birth of Photography (with Helen Rappaport)will be published in 2013.
