Marion Post Wolcott
Born in Montclair, NJ, 7 June 1910; died in Santa Barbara, CA, 24 Nov 1990).
American photographer. Post Wolcott pursued a career as a teacher, studying childhood psychology and anthropology at the New School for Social Research in New York City and at New York University. In the early 1930s she taught at a small, private school in Massachusetts where she witnessed not only the impact of the Great Depression on the working class, but also the extreme disparity between economic and social classes. In 1932, after the school had closed down, Post Wolcott moved to Europe: first to Paris, with the intention of studying modern dance, and then to Austria to continue her studies in childhood psychology at the University of Vienna. In Austria she was introduced to the Viennese photographer Trude Fleischmann (1895–1990), who encouraged her to pursue photography and recommended that she use the Rolleiflex camera. During this time Post Wolcott experienced the rise of Nazi fascism, with the assassination of Austrian Chancellor Dollfuss and the bombing of apartments of socialist workers near Vienna. When the university closed in 1934, Post Wolcott returned to the United States and taught at a progressive school in upstate New York, becoming active in the League Against War and Facism and interacting with the socially and politically conscious The Group Theatre. In the mid 1930s she attended meetings at the New York Photo League, where she discussed her work with other photographers including Ralph Steiner and Paul Strand. She accepted a job as a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, but felt disillusioned when limited to covering stories about women’s fashions. In 1938 Steiner showed Post Wolcott’s portfolio to Roy Stryker, head of the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), who hired her as a photographer; thus she joined a group of socially conscious photographers interested in the plight of human beings and optimistic about President Roosevelt’s New Deal programmes.
From 1938 to 1941 Post Wolcott photographed the communities and landscapes of New England and the South, including Kentucky, North Carolina, Florida, Louisiana and Mississippi. Her images highlighted the extreme differences between the wealthy and the poor, contrasting images of poor migrant farmers with gamblers at a horse race or the élite lounging in a private beach club. She also captured the racial discrimination and segregation pervasive in the South through images such as Negro Using ‘Colored Only’ Outside Stairway to Enter Movie Theater, Belzoni, MS, 1939. Some critics believe that her limited popularity, compared with other FSA photographers such as Walker Evans, Ben Shahn and Dorothea Lange, was due not only to her late arrival at the organization, but also to her style of photography, which tended to focus on daily encounters instead of the dramatic and monumental images that came to epitomize FSA photographs (see fig.). However, scholars praise Post Wolcott’s images for the way in which they convey everyday life, with its tensions and divisions as well as its leisurely pastimes and celebratory moments (see fig.). As a latecomer to the FSA, part of Post Wolcott’s mandate was to photograph the positive impacts of the New Deal programmes and to fill certain gaps in the FSA photographic files in order to create a comprehensive documentation of American life after the Great Depression. While some believe these assignments restricted her creativity, she also had a certain degree of freedom in taking pictures of subjects she favoured, such as a series of New England after a blizzard; her particular interest in photographing landscapes was based on the belief that, in addition to their beauty and vastness, they conveyed a great deal about the living conditions of the people who inhabited the land.
In 1941 she married Lee Wolcott, an assistant to Henry Wallace, Secretary of Agriculture under President Roosevelt, and left the FSA to raise a family and manage their farms. However, she continued to take photographs while travelling overseas to such countries as Iran, Egypt, Pakistan and India, and remained actively involved with photography communities throughout California until her death at the age of 80.
Retrieved from Oxford Art Online: http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T2021926?q=Marion+Post+Wolcott&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit (Accessed Feb. 21, 2012)
