Los Angeles grew from a quiet coastal town into the entertainment capital of the world in less than a hundred years. For more than a century of that history, a Watson was on the scene with a camera. Known in entertainment circles as “The First Family of Hollywood,” the Watsons are an American photography dynasty: ten men across four generations who shot the disasters, everyday triumphs, movie stars, and headline trials of the 20th and early 21st centuries.
It started with James Watson (1863–1925), an English-born Salvation Army minister who arrived in Los Angeles in 1901. Working from a Civil War-era government manual, he taught himself how to shoot on 5x7 glass plate negatives. He photographed Buffalo Bill in 1903, four-masted ships in San Pedro Harbor, and the aftermath of the 1910 Los Angeles Times building bombing. His darkroom in the family pantry hooked his sons on the craft. Coy Watson Sr. (1890–1968) went on to work as a silent film stuntman, assistant director for Mack Sennett, and special effects man for Douglas Fairbanks. His younger brother, George R. Watson (1892–1977), became the second staff photographer hired by the Los Angeles Times in 1917 and later ran the Los Angeles bureau of ACME Newspictures. George patented an early forerunner to microfilm in 1916, took the first published aerial news photos of Los Angeles in 1919, and transmitted the nation’s first cross-country wire photo in 1925.
In the third generation, Coy Sr.’s six sons—Coy Jr., Harry, Billy, Delmar, Garry, and Bobs—started out in front of the lens. Collectively, the Watson kids appeared in more than 1,000 silent and Golden Age films alongside Jimmy Stewart, Shirley Temple, W.C. Fields, and Spencer Tracy, a run that earned the family a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Eventually, all six brothers traded film sets for press passes and darkrooms. They served as World War II Coast Guard and combat photographers, worked the city desks at major Los Angeles newspapers, shot early television newsreels, and ran the commercial 6 Watson Bros. photography studio. Carrying the trade into a fourth generation, Garry’s son Daniel W. Watson became the tenth photographer in the family, closing out a 120-year run in Southern California photojournalism.
Prints and cameras from the Watson archive sit in the permanent collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Hollywood Heritage Museum, and the Newseum. FATHOM presents a growing selection of vintage press prints and museum-quality archival editions from the Watson Family Photo Archive, building toward a complete survey of all ten photographers.