Marion
Post (June 7, 1910 - November 24, 1990), later Marion Post
Wolcott, was a noted American photographer who worked for
the Farm Security Administration during the Great
Depression documenting poverty and deprivation.
Marion
Post was born in New Jersey on June 7, 1910. Her parents
split up and she 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. She studied at The New School.
Post
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 she went
to Europe to study with her sister Helen. Helen was
studying with Trude Fleischmann, a Viennese photographer. Marion
Post showed Fleischmann some of her photographs and was told to stick
to photography.
Marion
Post (Wolcott), Kentucky, February 1940.
While
in Vienna she 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 she 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.
Post's
photographs for the FSA often explore the political aspects of
poverty and deprivation. They also often find humour in the
situations she encountered.
In
1941 she met Lee Wolcott. When she had finished her assignments for
the FSA she married him, and later had to fit in her photography
around raising a family and a great deal of travelling and living
overseas.

















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