Marion Post Wolcott: Documenting America

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). 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…

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