Family at Bayou Bourbeau Plantation

During August, 1940, Marion Post photographed this family who lived on the Bayou Bourbeau plantation near Natchitoches, Louisiana. 

Employed for three years by the Farm Security Administration, Post became interested in photography while living in Germany.  In Silent Witnesses, Jacqueline Ellis not only tells us about Marion, she also provides background about the types of pictures she took:

Post Wolcott photographed an American community physically divided, but spiritually equivalent in their connection with the land.  From this point of view, the progression of radical social change in Marion Post Wolcott's photographs of the landscape leads to an ahistorical point of transcendence, euphemistically defined as universal and naturally American.  Her visual criticisms of American capitalism extended from this ultimately conservative political perspective.  (Silent Witnesses: Representations of Working-Class Women in the United States, by Jacqueline Ellis, pages 70-71.)

Click on the image for a better view.  Part of the "Bound for Glory" exhibition from the Library of Congress.

Credits

Image 10 (of 70) included in the Exhibition, "Bound for Glory," online courtesy Library of Congress.  The LOC describes this reproduction, from a color slide, as follows:

Marion Post Wolcott.  Bayou Bourbeau plantation, a Farm Security Administration cooperative.  Vicinity of Natchitoches, Louisiana, August 1940. Reproduction from color slide.  LC-USF351-93. LC-DIG-fsac-1a34354.  FSA/OWI [Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information] Collection.  Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Quoted passages from Silent Witnesses: Representations of Working-Class Women in the United States, by Jacqueline Ellis.