Early Life
Marion Post was born in 1910 and grew up in Bloomfield, New Jersey, in the middle of the most heavily populated industrial region in America. Her mother was a supporter of labor unions, racial equality and leftist politics. Marion’s physician father considered his wife too radical and eccentric, and divorced her when Marion was thirteen. Marion learned a lesson in independence when her mother, a registered nurse, refused any financial assistance from her father [21] . Her mother moved to Greenwich Village and worked with Margaret Sanger, a prominent women's health and birth control advocate [22]. Her mother began travelling around the country organizing birth control clinics and addressing the issues of working-class women. Marion considered her mother a pioneer whose field work showed her courage, strength and compassion. She later followed in her mother’s footsteps, becoming a pioneer in her own right as fieldworker for the FSA [23]. Marion first chose dance as her means of expression, and studied dance at the New School with Ruth St. Denis. But her true mentor was fellow student Doris Humphrey, who taught her three important lessons: balance was the ultimate achievement in art; a stage must be precisely marked in space and time; and emotion should guide one’s life. Marion later relied on these 3 maxims in her photography work [24]. At age 21 Marion decided to join her sister, a photography student in Austria. Marion studied education and child psychology at the University of Vienna. She witnessed frequent National Socialist Party demonstrations against Fascism. Politically active students at the University found photography as the best medium for spreading the Socialist message. Documentary photography began to focus on the working masses, their environments and conditions [25]. Post bought a Rolleiflex camera in Vienna, and began experimenting with documentary photography. But the increasing political violence and Nazi rallies in Europe led her to return to America. She found a teaching job in New York at an unlikely time, as many schools were closing because of the Depression and people were hostile toward single women taking jobs needed by unemployed men. Post took photos of the schoolchildren while learning the basics of developing film. Eventually she left teaching to become a photographer [26]. |
Photography Career
Post attended workshops led by documentary photographer Ralph Steiner in Manhattan. When she began marketing her work to magazines, Steiner noticed. He included her in a Tennessee film project documenting the Highlander Folk School, which trained people for social justice causes like labor rights and the enfranchisement of blacks. The film and Post’s photos promoted union organization, and angered southern businessmen. The experience nourished her social conscience. Ralph Steiner later recommended Post to Roy Stryker at the FSA. Although she had far less experience than other FSA photographers, Stryker saw her as a fresh face and hired her full-time [27]. It was 1938, and a time of change in the agency. Stryker’s team of photographers had spent three years in the field, filling the files with pictures of poverty-stricken farmers and migrants. An economic downturn in 1937 led to hostility from a Congress skeptical that the FSA and New Deal resettlement programs should continue. Stryker wanted a more comprehensive recording of society, with positive images to balance the hard-times scenes [28]. He had to reckon with the demographic shift in America from rural to urban. "Although Stryker and the photographers he directed did not set out to capture the urban element of the transformation, it was unavoidable" [29]. The FSA gradually accepted the fact that large numbers of small farmers and their families would move to cities to become industrial workers [30]. Post filled in the gaps in the FSA record of predominantly Anglo-Saxon white subjects. On Post’s first assignment to the coal mining regions of West Virginia, she photographed Bohemians, Poles, Hungarians, and the Mexican immigrants who had arrived as strikebreakers for the 1926 miner’s strike. Her next assignment was to the rural South. Post endured greater gender issues than other female FSA photographers because of her youth. Particularly in the South, people were suspicious of her intentions as a single white woman travelling alone. She didn’t have the benefit of an economist husband as a travelling companion, like Dorothea Lange [31]. Post made three excursions to Florida to record the successes there of the FSA. But she found only minimal success in the FSA’s attempts to provide migrants with organized and clean dwellings. Her images show unsanitary facilities lacking in lights, toilets or running water, overcrowded and damaged by natural disasters. She captured the devastation of a bad fruit season that left camps abandoned and falling apart. The next year, a bad vegetable season resulted in few jobs for vegetable laborers. Lack of rain in the 1939 season led to most transients working not in the fields but in packing houses. Post wanted to create a photo essay on packing house conditions and in one woman’s story, found the gender-issued material she was seeking. The 32-year-old mother of eleven children was “frozen out” by an employer claiming she was too old to endure the long stretch, and not hireable even during peak need because she looked pregnant. Post’s photo essay of packing houses was not supported by Stryker, who wanted her to move on [32]. Just 30 miles from the migrant camps, she focused on Miami’s rich residents and tourists. Post found the rich difficult to deal with, and shot many of her scenes from a safe distance. She relied upon the techniques of space and balance learned from Doris Humphrey, composing photos in which the playgrounds of the wealthy were the stage. The shiny, flawless hair and skin of the rich, and their open, spatial environments contrasted sharply with the migrants in their cluttered, cramped quarters, with their tousled hair, skin sores and bad teeth. These photos of the rich became her most highly praised work, providing a contrast to the misery of the poor and making her case about class division in the United States. Hers were the first FSA photographs to show an upper class oblivious to the plight of the poor [33]. |
A Telling Photograph
Stryker asked Post to shoot billboards of American commerce in the South, showing positive economic activity. The photograph On Main Street in Wendell, North Carolina, 1939 illustrates the social consciousness of Marion Post. In the book Let us Now Praise Famous Women, Andrea Fisher sums up the critical elements of this incredible photograph. Standing out in the forefront is a well-dressed white man looking bold and challenging, symbolizing white male superiority. Two black men swerve with large, urgent strides to avoid both the white man and a white woman holding a baby. The black men are the embodiment of racial and economic inferiority. “The white man’s stance is intractable; the black men hurry to defer: though they remain free to move, theirs is the scurrying mobility of the powerless” [34]. The woman is caught in her own moment of vulnerability, clutching her baby as she faces dual threats. Her small, frozen step makes her look hesitant in comparison to the white man solidly planted on the sidewalk. Even in a segregated environment, the physically mobile black men seem to have more relative power than the woman. “The idiosyncratic imagery of small town commerce remains obscured – perhaps even scarred – by the tension of the street” [35]. Post later created photo essays on the Appalachian region of Kentucky and the Caswell County region of the Virginia-North Carolina border. She was sent to Louisiana and Montana, but grew tired of the work and the increasing routine aspects of her assignments. With America preparing for World War II, Stryker asked for photos of the aircraft and defense industries, which she found highly unappealing. On June 6, 1941 she married a man she had known only six weeks, Lee Wolcott, a USDA assistant in Washington. A rift developed between Post and Stryker, aggravated by her husband’s insistence that her married name be assigned to every photo she had ever taken. Holding a higher position than Stryker, Lee Wolcott got his way when he reminded officials “‘when a female employee in government service marries, her legal surname must be used by her instead of her maiden name'" [36]. Post-Wolcott resigned as an FSA photographer on February 21, 1942, settled into family life, and never photographed professionally again [37]. |
Analysis
Marion Post Wolcott rejected her privileged upbringing to live a bohemian lifestyle, travel on her own, and photograph the poor. She was hired by the FSA just as the emphasis switched from representations of the poor to those of the middle and upper class. Yet Post went against orders by photographing the continuing desolation at migrant camps, in spite of her scripts to capture the successes of these same camps. She was determined to show gender discrimination at the packing houses of Florida, but was pushed by Stryker to move on to more positive things. By virtue of being young and female, she faced her own challenges with job discrimination, and made the necessary adaptations in order to secure her place. Though not taken seriously in her representations of oppressed women and migrant camps, she capitalized on Stryker's rejection. She moved on as instructed, and relied on her photographic skill and artistic eye to create her most important and influential work. Her photographs of rich sunbathers in Miami spoke pointedly about the contrast between the rich and poor in society. When told to shoot advertisements and billboards, Post went beyond the call. Her Main Street photograph is a perfect example. The billboard seems at first to be the focus, but Post recognized a more telling scene unfolding on the stage, giving her photograph much deeper significance and symbolism. She zeroed in on one perfect moment in space and time, making a powerful statement about race and gender in American society. Post’s photography career ended in an unfair twist of fate, her new husband calling the shots and creating hostility with her boss, Roy Stryker. The subtle irony was that Marion Post was caught in the middle of opposing men, stuck in a precarious position just like the woman in her Main Street photograph. |