| Birth Name: | George Railton Watson |
| Birth Date: | 10 February 1892 |
| Birth Place: | Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada |
| Death Place: | Los Angeles, California, United States |
| Occupation: | Photographer |
George Watson (February 10, 1892May 12, 1977) was a 20th-century American photographer working in California. Several of his relatives were also in the photo business, or in the motion picture industry, or broadcast news.[1]
Watson was born in 1892 in Moncton, Westmorland, New Brunswick, Canada.[2] Watson immigrated to the U.S. in 1900 and was naturalized a citizen in 1909.[3] Watson got his first newspaper staff job in Los Angeles in 1910.[4] He shot aerial photos of Los Angeles in 1919, and he photographed the St. Francis dam disaster and the Owens River Aqueduct bombing.[5] Watson also founded the Los Angeles Press Photographers Association.
He left newspapers to become manager of ACME News Photo Service, later UPI Photo.[6] He took celebrity and Hollywood photos in the 1920s and 1930s in company with colleagues like Paul Strite, Dick Farrell, and Hyman Fink.[7] The family archive includes of a photo by Watson of Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin together at a movie premiere in the 1920s.[8]
The work of the Watson clan was exhibited in a show at the Los Angeles Science Museum in 1972.[9] The Getty holds a collection of Watson's shots.[10] The total Watson family archive may include between one and two million photographs.