Marion Post Wolcott

Wolcott in 1940.

Marion Post (later Marion Post Wolcott) (June 7, 1910 - November 24, 1990) was a noted photographer who worked for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression documenting poverty and deprivation. She was born in New Jersey. Her parents split up and she was sent to boarding school, spending time at home with her mother in Greenwich Village when not at school. Here she met many artists and musicians and became interested in dance. She studied at The New School.

She trained as a teacher, and went to work in a small town in Massachusetts. Here she saw the reality of the Depression and the problems of the poor. When the school closed she went to Europe to study with her sister Helen. Helen was studying with Trude Fleischmann, a Viennese photographer. Marion showed Flieschmann some of her photographs and was told to stick to photography.

A juke joint located in Belle Glade, Florida. Photographed by Marion Post Wolcott in 1944.

While in Vienna she saw some of the Nazi attacks on the Jewish population and was horrified. Soon she and her sister had to return to America for safety. She went back to teaching but also continued her photography and became involved in the anti-fascist movement. At the New York Photo League she met Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand who encouraged her. When she found that the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin kept sending her to do "ladies' stories," Ralph Steiner took her portfolio to show Roy Stryker, head of the Farm Security Administration, and Paul Strand wrote a letter of recommendation. Stryker was impressed by her work and hired her immediately.

Her photographs for the FSA often explore the political aspects of poverty and deprivation. They also often find humour in the situations she encountered. Her work is some of the finest in the extensive archive.

In 1941 she met Lee Wolcott. When she had finished her assignments for the FSA she married him, and later had to fit in her photography around raising a family and a great deal of travelling and living overseas.

Bibliography

African American children from Wadesboro, North Carolina. Photographed by Marion Post Wolcott in 1938.

• Hendrickson, Paul. Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott. New York: Knopf, 1992.

• Hurley, F. Jack. Marion Post Wolcott: A Photographic Journey. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989.

• Wolcott-Moore, Linda, ed. The Photography of Marion Post Wolcott Website created by Wolcott's daughter, hosted on J. David Sapir's site Fixing Shadows, available online: http://people.virginia.edu/~ds8s/mpw/mpw-bio.html, 1999.

• Wolcott, Marion Post. Marion Post Wolcott, FSA Photographs. Carmel, CA: Friends of Photography, 1983.

• ———. The Photographs of Marion Post Wolcott. Washington, DC: Library of Congress in association with GILES, 2008.

External links

• Interview in Frontline Diplomacy: The Foreign Affairs Oral History Collection of the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training.
• An extensive anthology of Marion Post Wolcott's photography edited by her daughter, Linda Wolcott-Moore.
• FSA Photos, including many by Wolcott, posted by Library of Congress on Flickr Commons Website.
• Oral history interview with Marion Post Wolcott, 1965 Jan. 18, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Marion Post Wolcott