Photographs by Marion Post Wolcott (1910 – 1990)

Born in New Jersey, United States in 1910, Marion Post began her career in photography in 1932 in New York. Over the next few years, she would photograph commissions for LIFE and Fortune magazines. A brief stint at the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin was followed by an introduction to Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration. From 1938 to 1942, Post would travel across the breadth of the United States to photograph the poverty, deprivation and indeed, the soul of America.

In 1941, she married Leon Oliver Wolcott, then the deputy director of war relations for the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the Roosevelt Administration. Pausing her career in 1942 to raise her family, she eventually returned to photography, capturing life in the Middle East and Asia before returning to America to pursue a freelance career until her death in 1990. Her extraordinary work earned her the Dorothea Lange Award and a posthumous Society of Photographic Education's Lifetime Achievement Award a year after her passing.