Photographer Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990) remains best known for her work for the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration that chronicled depression-era American life and culture. The range of her photographs, which address many American social and economic issues that greatly affected rural areas including extreme wealth disparity, race relations, and the impact of federal subsidies upon the agricultural industry, stand out among her colleagues at the FSA.

Born in Bloomfield, NJ, Wolcott initially studied modern dance and early childhood education at the New School for Social Research and New York University (1927-29). Her subsequent experience teaching in a small Massachusetts mill town beset by increasing inequality between wealthy children and the children of struggling millworkers contributed to her desire for social change that guided her later photographic career. After continuing her studies in Europe from 1932-34, Wolcott returned to New York and briefly resumed teaching before deciding to pursue photography as a career instead.

She attended meetings of the New York Photo League, where she met influential photographers, including Ralph Steiner (1899-1986) and Paul Strand (1890-1976) while working first as a freelance photographer and later a staff photographer at the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (1937). After expressing her boredom with the fashion stories assigned to her, Steiner and Strand recommended her to Roy Stryker, head of the Farm Security Administration’s photographic division in Washington DC. Stryker was so impressed with her work that he immediately hired Wolcott as the FSA’s first full-time female staff member.

While employed with the FSA from 1938-42, Wolcott traveled to locations across the country on assignment to document the conditions that Americans faced during the Great Depression. In a brief but prolific 3 ½ years, Wolcott made over 9,000 images and quickly gained respect for her dedication, hard work, and empathetic approach to her subjects. Today, she is highly regarded for her poignant, well-crafted photographs that documented a variety of people from coal miners and tenant farmers to middle- and upper-class tourists primarily in the South. Her ability to move seamlessly between these different communities and her keen eye for both subtle and stark signifiers of race and class divides are considered her most influential contributions to American documentary photography.

The breadth of Wolcott’s brief but remarkable career finally gained recognition late in her life, partially due to the emerging study of photographic history during the 1960s and the concurrent reexamination of art history from a feminist perspective. During the last decade of her life, she received many awards, including the National Press Photographers’ Lifetime Achievement Award (1990) and Society of Photographic Educators’ Lifetime Achievement Award (1991).

In addition to her inclusion in numerous group exhibitions, Wolcott continues to be the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Seattle Art Museum (1987); International Center for Photography (1990); Birmingham Museum of Art (2008); and the Clark Humanities Museum, Scripps College, Claremont (2014).

Wolcott’s photographs can be found in many major American museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Library of Congress, Washington DC; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Portland Art Museum; Art Institute of Chicago; St. Louis Art Museum; and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro.