1. MARION POST WOLCOTT, Boys fishing in creek, Shriever, LA, 1940, 10x7" Dye transfer print, Printed 1982, LIGHT Gallery Authentication stamp signed in pencil by Tennyson Schad on print verso; artist, title and date inscribed in pencil.

2. RUSSELL LEE, Couples at square dance, McIntosh County, OK, c. 1940, 6.5x9.75" Dye transfer print, Printed 1986, LIGHT Gallery Authentication stamp signed in pencil by Tennyson Schad on print verso; artist, title and date inscribed in pencil.

Marion Post Walcott was known for family scenes, workers, and rural landscape architectural scenes.

Marion Post Wolcott (1910-1990) was born in Montclair, New Jersey, and educated at the New School for Social Research, New York University, and at the University of Vienna. Upon graduation in 1932, she returned to New York to pursue a career in photography and attended workshops with Ralph Steiner. By 1936, she was a freelance photographer for Life, Fortune, and other magazines. She became a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletinin 1937 and remained there until Paul Strand recommended her to Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Administration, where she worked from 1938 to 1942. Wolcott suspended her photographic career thereafter in order to raise her family but continued to photograph periodically as she traveled and taught in Iran, Pakistan, Egypt, and New Mexico. In 1968 she returned to freelance photography in California and concentrated on color work, which she had been producing in the early 1940s. Wolcott's photographs have been included in group and solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, ICP, and elsewhere. Among other honors she received are the Dorothea Lange Award, and the 1991 Society for Photographic Education's Lifetime Achievement Award. Several books have been written about her life and career, including Paul Henrickson's Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life of Marion Post Wolcott (1992).

Wolcott's documentary photographs for the FSA are notable for their variation in subject matter. Because she joined the organization late in its existence, Stryker often gave her assignments intended to complete projects already begun by others. Wolcott's photographs show wealthy and middle-class subjects in addition to the poor people and migrant workers who appeared in most FSA photographs. Her body of work provides a view into another side of the 1930s in America, among that small percentage of people who could afford to escape the damaging effects of the Depression.

CREDIT: International Center of Photography https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/marion-post-wolcott

Russell Lee (1903-1986) began his study of photography in 1935, ten years after earning a degree from Lehigh University (Pennsylvania) in chemical engineering. Photography, he thought, would aid his ability as a painter studying in San Francisco and at the Woodstock art colony (New York) in the early 1930s. His career took an abrupt shift when he was invited by Roy Stryker to join the government's Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lee worked from 1936 to 1943 as a prolific photographer in the FSA combining his keen sense of documentary with an engineer's precise mastery of lighting (especially flash photography). Stryker called him a "taxonomist with a camera." Besides making more FSA negatives than any other photographer, Lee was one of the first to utilize new color photography materials in his recording of people and events in Pie Town, New Mexico. After leaving the FSA, Lee continued to work for various government agencies until 1947 when Standard Oil of New Jersey hired him. His industrial images were printed in Fortune and in The New York Times. A second career spanned the years 1956 to 1973 while Lee was on the teaching faculty of the University of Missouri, and later at the University of Texas at Austin. Despite an education in engineering, Lee's images and teachings never underplayed the role of photography as an objective witness to call attention to the pride and prejudice that characterized society in the mid-1900s.

Credit: Luminous Lint.

1. Very good. Edge wear. Bent corner. 1/8" removed emulsion in margin, does not affect print.
2. Excellent. Chemical staining from printing process in margin on bottom of print.