Looking For The Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award
Marion Post Wolcott’s magnificent images of rural America in the 1930s are among the treasure of American photography. And what sets them apart from the work of the other distinguished photographers who focused their camera on Depression-ravaged America is the profoundly touching and personal quality of her pictures: she seems to have gone beyond the harsh realities of the time to embrace and illuminate the life she saw.
Seventy-seven of her memorable photographs illustrate this resonant biography which celebrates her art and her life. It is the story of an unusually attractive, gifted, and adventurous woman who suddenly, at the age of thirty-one, decided to abandon her career and address herself to the responsibilities of family.
Born and brought up in Ner Jersey, Marion Post did not begin to think seriously about photography until, on her return to America after attending the University of Vienna, she discovered the works of Paul Strand and then studied with Ralph Steiner. She photographed the New OYrk theater scene struggled as a freelancer, and worked on a Philidelphia newspaper. But her true career began in 1938, when she joined the Farm Security Administration's great pioneering government-sponsored corps of photographers -- among them Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange -- whose project it was to create a visual record of America. She made scores of memorable pictures, many of which were to find their way into major collections, including those in the Metropolitan Museum of Arts the Museum of Modern Art, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Smithsonian Institution.
Then, in 1941, Marion Post fell passionately in love with, and married, a widower, the father of two very young children -- and then, having herself become pregnant, put her camera down, never again to take a professional photograph. The meaning and consequences of her decision are at the emotional center of this compelling book, whose author sought out and came to know Marion Post Walcott and, in further preparation for understanding her life and work, traveled extensively to find the people she herself had so perceptively and movingly photographed.
The result is a remarkable book about the photographic and the human enterprise.
“The best of Marion Post Wolcott’s (1910-1990) photographs of the Deep South during the Depression rank with those of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, her colleagues in the Farm Security Administration. Unlike them, Wolcott (who also ventured to Montana and Vermont) is scarcely remembered today, partly because she dropped out of the FSA in 1942 after three years on the road, renouncing her art for the sake of marriage and children. Illustrated with 92 photographs, this affectionate biographical-critical portrait by Washington Post staff writer Hendrickson recreates Wolcott’s brave solo travels, from shantytowns and speakeasies to plantations, coal miners’ homes, strikes and swank beach clubs. Her cogent documentary pictures celebrate ordinary, enduring Americans and fathom the hidden costs of racial bigotry, cowboy dreams and our tendency to make the dispossessed invisible.”
“This is an undocumented biography of a photographer best known for the compassionate Farm Security photographs she took during the final years of the Depression and nearly forgotten today. In 1941, at the age of 31, Marion Post abandoned her greatest passion to pursue marriage and motherhood, having produced a remarkable body of work in only three years. Few of the photographs here are familiar, but all are strong and enduring images of common places and common people, good-hearted Americans struggling to keep their lives intact during the most catastrophic experience of our century. Washington Post staff writer Hendrickson tells Wolcott’s story in a folksy narrative that often overpowers her unobtrusive photographic style. The absence of footnotes and a bibliography limits the book’s audience and usefulness, though informed readers will be interested.”