The Photographs of Marion Post Wolcott

Book excerpt: "The approximately 172,000 film negatives and transparencies in the Library of Congress's collection from the Farm Security Administration (FSA), later the Office of War Information (OWI), provide a unique view of American life during the Great Depression and World War II. This government photography project, headed by Roy E. Stryker, employed many relatively unknown names who later became some of the twentieth-century's best-known photographers, such as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, and Carl Mydans. Initially conceived to document government loans to farmers and their subsequent resettlement in suburban communities, the project expanded to create a visual record of agricultural workers across the United States. Later, Stryker's photographers recorded both rural and urban centers as the nation prepared for World War II. Each volume in the Fields of Vision series features an introduction to the work of a single FSA photographer by a leading contemporary author or writer, and presents fifty striking images that show how the particular vision of these photographers helped shape the collective identity of America. Their evocative pictures transport the viewer to American homes, farms, and streets of the 1930s and 1940s, while offering a glimpse of a new narrative and intimate style that was later to blossom on the pages of Look and Life magazines. For many Americans of the pre-television age, the diversity and complexity of their country was defined by the lenses of these men and women. This volume focuses on the photographs of Marion Post Wolcott"--