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Marion Post Wolcott is best known for the
social documentary photographs she made
for the Farm Security Administration (FSA)
during the later part of the Depression, including
work in the Great Plains. She was
born Marion Post in 1910 in Montclair, New
Jersey. Her older sister Helen was considered
the more artistic and was encouraged toward
a career in the arts, becoming well known for
her portraits of Native Americans done for
the Department of the Interior in the 1930s
and 1940s. Marion was sent to a series of
boarding schools and eventually attended the
New School for Social Research and New York
University, intending to teach. On a visit to Vienna
in 1933 she was introduced to photography
and was strongly attracted to its immediacy
and power.
After she returned to the United States Marion
held a series of jobs until she was hired
by the FSA to photograph farm problems
and general rural life in America. She worked
for the agency from July 1938 until November
1941, traveling thousands of miles through the
South, New England, and the West. On June 6,
1941, she married Lee Wolcott, an administrator
for the Department of Agriculture, and, at
his insistence, her credits were changed on all
her photographs to retroactively reflect her
married name.
In the fall of 1941 she set out on her last major photographic expedition for the fsa, covering Colorado, Nebraska, Montana, Idaho, and, briefly, California. Although she was unfamiliar with the region, her Plains work is some of her best, emphasizing the openness of the land and the relative insignificance of the human impact upon it. She succeeded in capturing the sense of space and distance by using roads, telephone poles, long trains, and grain elevators as compositional devices.
Wolcott retired from professional photography in 1941, raised a family of four children, was recognized late in life as a significant contributor to American photography, and died in 1990.
See also AGRICULTURE: Farm Security Administration.