Marion Post Wolcott was an unknown 28-year-old photographer when she first picked up her cameras for the Farm Security Administration in the autumn of 1938. She headed out, solo, into the hollers and hard towns of West Virginia to document some of the poorest people and places in the United States.
An unmarried, unaccompanied woman traveling alone was somewhere between eyebrow-raising and scandalous in the era, particularly in the small towns, farms and backwoods where she would spend so much time during her four years at the FSA.
She kept traveling, almost nonstop, from West Virginia to Mississippi to Florida to Vermont to Montana and dozens of places in between. She racked up thousands of miles and about 15,000 photographs, swatting mosquitos, fixing flats, filing expense reports, fending off men who followed her to motel rooms and finagling with Washington bosses who didn’t regard her work all that highly. She was paid about $2,300 per year (about $53,000 in today’s economy).
Wolcott shot this photo on her first assignment for the Farm Security Administration in September 1938. A coal miner’s daughter carries kerosene for lighting the household lamps. Prints and Photographs Division.
Despite all this, many of her images would become — after several decades languishing in obscurity — some of the most resonant images of American life ever taken, shown today in the Museum of Modern Art and dozens of other museums and high-end galleries around the world. Her FSA work, like rest of the project’s amazing lineup of photographers — Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee — are preserved in the Library Prints and Photographs Division. Many of her personal papers are held at the Arizona Arts Archives.
“I was given freedom to — well, document America,” she once said of her work, a quote featured on the back of “The Photographs of Marion Post Wolcott,” part of the Library’s Fields of Vision series.
Her personality and courage were always as vibrant as her images. Those were the practical underpinnings that made her work possible. Example: She managed to get herself into a Black juke joint in the Mississippi Delta in 1939 – an outrageous idea for a white woman in that time and place – and then get this couple to forget she was there long enough to take this timeless photograph.
Wolcott’s image of this dancing couple outside Clarksdale, Mississippi, on a Saturday night in 1939, has been widely anthologized. Prints and Photographs Division.
All this makes her career worth noting during Women’s History Month, but of course it’s larger than that.
“These beautiful and inspiring pictures, and the spirit that gave rise to them, are part of our history … they represent America at its best,” wrote author and critic Francine Prose in the introduction to “The Photographs of Marion Post Wolcott.” “… much of her work transcends mere reportage, expertly crossing over into the realm of art.”