Tuesday, February 15, 2022 – STRIKING PHOTOS OF THE DEPRESSION IN RURAL VIRGINIA

By admin

TONIGHT

https://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2022/02/15/clone-rihs-lecture-footsteps-nellie-bly

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 15, 2022


598th Issue

MARION POST WOLCOTT

PHOTOGRAPER

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

A tough, feisty photographer who began freelancing for the Associated Press in 1935, Wolcott has only recently received the attention she deserves. Most of her fairly short career was spent working under Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration, following the Stryker formula for ​“documenting” working-class life across the country during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Her New England pictures are eloquent examples of that formula, merging old and new New Englands into an (almost) comfortable relationship with each other. Her own inclination, after studies at the New School for Social Research in New York and the University of Vienna (she heard Hitler speak in Berlin), was to be more of a social activist, an inclination that occasionally surfaces in her ​“off duty” pictures. In 1941, with husband Lee Wolcott, she moved to a farm in Virginia. For the next three decades she raised a family, taught school, and traveled with her husband, who joined the Foreign Service after a farming accident. In 1975, she returned to photography, this time specializing in color. She and her husband settled in San Francisco in 1978.

Marion Post Wolcott, Miner’s wife on porch of their home, an abandoned company store. Pursglove, West Virginia, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.15

Marion Post Wolcott, Dancing during the Cotton Carnival. Memphis, Tennessee, May 1940, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.43

Marion Post Wolcott, The Piney Hotel, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.35

Marion Post Wolcott, White man on wagon, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.30

Marion Post Wolcott, Gathering of black men, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.26 Title

Marion Post Wolcott, Work horses on a Farm Security Administration project. Scott’s Bluff, Nebraska, 1941, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.53

Marion Post Wolcott, Hanging bands of tobacco in barn to dry, Russell Spear’s farm. Near Lexington, Kentucky, 1940, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.21

Marion Post Wolcott, Workers and truck, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.8

Marion Post Wolcott, Coney Island Lunch, ca. 1938, printed later, gelatin silver print, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Dr. John H. and Jann Arrington Wolcott, 1998.120.34

Tuesday Photo of the Day

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MONDAY PHOTO OF THE DAY

GREYHOUND BUS TERMINAL ON 38TH STREET
NEXT TO OLD PENN STATION
GUY LUDWIG, ANDY SPARBERG, GLORIA HERMAN,  GLORIA HERMAN AND CLARA BELLA GOT IT RIGHT!

Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff

All image are copyrighted (c) Roosevelt Island Historical Society unless otherwise indicated

Sources

SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN ART MUSEUM

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