Background
Marion Post Wolcott was born on June 7, 1910, in Montclair, New Jersey, United States.
1940
Marion Post Wolcott
Marion Post Wolcott with Rolleiflex and Speed Graphic in hand in Montgomery County, Maryland
Marion Post Wolcott
(Marion Post Wolcott's work with the Farm Security Adminis...)
Marion Post Wolcott's work with the Farm Security Administration covered the end of the Great Depression and the beginning of the second world war; few photographers covered as much of the United States, with photos from the Mountain West, the Deep South, the Florida Coast, and New England.
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Marion Post Wolcott was born on June 7, 1910, in Montclair, New Jersey, United States.
Her parents split up and Marion Post 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.
Marion Post studied at the New School for Social Research (1928) and at New York University (1929), both in New York City, before taking her Bachelor of Arts in 1934 from the University of Vienna, Austria.
Marion Wolcott 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 Marion Wolcott went to Europe to study with her sister Helen. Helen was studying with Trude Fleischmann, a Viennese photographer. Marion Wolcott showed Fleischmann some of her photographs and was told to stick to photography.
While in Vienna Marion Wolcott 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, Marion Wolcott 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.
In 1941 Marion Wolcott met Leon Oliver Wolcott, deputy director of war relations for the U. S. Department of Agriculture under Franklin Roosevelt. They married, and Marion Wolcott continued her assignments for the FSA but resigned shortly thereafter in February 1942. Wolcott found it difficult to fit in her photography around raising a family and a great deal of traveling and living overseas.
In the 1970s, a renewed interest in Wolcott's images among scholars rekindled her own interest in photography. In 1978, Marion Wolcott mounted her first solo exhibition in California, and by the 1980s the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art began to collect her photographs. Marion Post Wolcott's work is archived at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona.
(Marion Post Wolcott's work with the Farm Security Adminis...)
A juke joint located in Belle Glade, Florida
1944African American children from Wadesboro, North Carolina
1938Negro Home near Charleston, South Carolina
1938Ada Turner and Evelyn M. Driver Home Management
1939Old Mountain Cabin Made of Hand Hewn Logs, near Jackson, Breathitt County, Kentucky
1940Pahokee "Hotel", Pahokee, Florida
1941Men on tracks
1941Boys fishing in Southern U.S., Schriever, LA
1940Main Street, Brattleboro, Vermont
1938Tobacco Workers Taking a Nap in Tobacco Warehouse, Durham, NC
1939Marion Wolcott was a member of the Newspaper Guild since 1936 and also belongs to the New York Photo League, ACLU, Art Affiliates of the University of California at Santa Barbara, and Friends of Photography.