Marion Post Wolcott Photographs

Shop our selection of photographs by Marion Post Wolcott as part of our selection of photographs and wall art for sale. Prolific American photographer Marion Post Wolcott’s photographs for Roy Stryker and the FSA ( Farm Security Administration) explore aspects of poverty and deprivation across America, the ravaging effects of the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, and the effects of the social divide between race and poverty. Through Styker, she was sent across the county through the plain states and the deep South. Post contributed over 9,000 photographs for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) from 1938 to 1942, and she was the first woman offered a full-time FSA appointment. Many of these FSA photographs are black and white; however, Wolcott also contributed 120 color photographs on behalf of the FSA through Kodak’s Kodachrome film samples.

In the 1970s, interest in Wolcott’s images among scholars renewed and also inspired Post to revisit photography. In 1978, Wolcott implemented her first solo exhibition, and by the 1980s, the Smithsonian Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art started to collect her images. Wolcott said: “Women have come a long way, but not far enough, Speak with your images from your heart and soul.” The original negatives of her collection remain in the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. Post’s images capture a time in America when hope and despair intertwined, capturing the Soul of American photography during the early 20th century.