Artist Birthday: Marion Post Wolcott

Starting in the middle of the 1800s, women were encouraged to pursue photography as an art form because it could be learned at home, and women would not have to risk seeing a nude model at art academies (that were closed to them anyway before the late 1800s). By the early 1900s, many women were engaged in photography as a profession, like Marion Post Wolcott.

Artist birthday for 10 June: Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990 US)

Marion Post Wolcott, Winter Tourists on Beach Near Sarasota, 1939, gelatin silver print on paper, 21.1 x 26.9 cm  The Museum of Modern Art, New York, © 2025 Artist or Estate of Artist (MOMA-P3249)

Wolcott spent most of her short photographic career with the Farm Security Administration. She was tasked with documenting working-class life across America. Her inclination, since she studied at the New School, was to use her camera for social activism. She documented the hard life of migrant worker families and drought-affected fields. From 1939 to 1941, she produced photographs for her "Gold Avenue" project, exploring the contrast between well-off, oblivious winter tourists in Florida, with the poor migrant workers and their families barely keeping together body and soul. In this view of Winter Tourists, Wolcott isolates the presumably "snowbirds" from the North juxtaposed with their giant car, emphasizing that the elite individuals are definitely a minority during the Depression, and as isolated from the true deprivation of the Depression as they are as the only two people on the beach.

Background

Social documentation photography flourished from the late 1800s until World War I (1914-1918). It was born anew during the Great Depression (1929-1940), a world-wide severe economic downturn. In America, the Depression was partially caused by a collapse of the agricultural network that was a result of years of persistent drought, and misuse of arable (farm-able) land. It caused pervasive rural poverty and waves of internal migration in the US by farmers in search of jobs and arable land.

The most comprehensive photography project of the period, sponsored by a number of government agencies, was the Farm Security Administrations "Historic Section". This project reflected the government's understanding that visual (photographic) documentation of farmers who had lost their farms and were being driven from their land by the Depression was required in order to justify Federal expenditures for relief programs. Eventually, the government desired photographs of more positive aspects of the national experience rather than unrelenting images of poverty.

Marion Post Wolcott was born in Montclair, NJ. She studied at the New School for Social Research in New York, New York University, and the University of Vienna, Austria. Graduating in 1932, she returned to New York to pursue a career as a photographer. By 1935 she was a freelance photographer for the Associated Press, Life, Fortune and other magazines, She became a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in 1937, and left there to work for the FSA in 1937 to 1942. For three decades after that she raised a family, only returning to photography, then in color, in 1975.