For 3½ years, Marion Post (later known as Marion Post Wolcott) was a principal photographer in the Farm Security Administration's Historical Section. In 1939, she took this picture of a 4th of July Celebration at St. Helena Island, South Carolina.
Janet Galligani Casey provides background information about Marion Post in her book, A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America:
[Post's] brief Depression-era career offers insight into the pressures faced by female photographers of the time, as well as the internal conflicts generated by the demands of accommodating one's own perceptions to the requirements of a government agency.
...When Post first joined the FSA in 1938 - the only woman granted a full-time appointment - she was twenty-eight years old and relatively untested professionally; she soon proved her mettle, however, by taking on long, arduous research trips through regions that were unfamiliar and occasionally unfriendly...
...the more than 5,000 photos that Post took for the FSA showcase not only a classic documentary style, featuring candid shots and unmanipulated lighting, but also an edgy, intelligent, sharp-witted perspective. And this perspective was clearly her own. Despite continuing controversy over the extent to which FSA director Roy Stryker controlled his photographers by, for instance, distributing shooting agendas, which some claim resulted in a uniformity of vision within the FSA archive, there seems little question that individual photographs maintained their distinctive outlooks.
What makes Post especially noteworthy is the extent to which she veered from, rather than fully complied with, Stryker's directives ... Her unique response to the plight of Depression-era rural citizens is inscribed not only through her choice of shots, but also through her letters to Stryker and such details as her captioning practices.
...Initially, she was assigned to broaden and deepen the FSA file by documenting New Deal successes, which would balance out the images of rural indigence created by Lange, Evans and Rothstein (all of whom had preceded Post in the agency) and help to justify a continued flow of resources into New Deal social programs. But Stryker had also expanded his documentary vision to includes the creation of, more generally, an "intellectually respectable" chronicle of 1930s America; hence he also wanted photographs that moved beyond poverty, and even beyond rurality. (A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America, by Janet Galligani Casey, pages 179-80.)
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Credits
Image 11 (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. A Fourth of July celebration. St. Helena Island, South Carolina, 1939. Reproduction from color slide. LC-USF351-206. LC-DIG-fsac-1a34304. FSA/OWI Collection. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Quoted passages from (A New Heartland: Women, Modernity, and the Agrarian Ideal in America, by Janet Galligani Casey.
