“A book, like a life, has surprises.” Paul Henrickson in Looking for the Light: The Hidden Life and Art of Marion Post Wolcott

Winter ponies and Marion Post Wolcott. “…her true career began in 1938, when she joined the Farm Security Administration's great pioneering government-sponsored corps of photographers — among them Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange — whose project it was to create a visual record of America. She made scores of memorable pictures, many of which were to find their way into major collections, including those in the Metropolitan Museum of Arts the Museum of Modern Art, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Smithsonian Institution.

“Then, in 1941, Marion Post fell passionately in love with, and married, a widower, the father of two very young children — and then, having herself become pregnant, put her camera down, never again to take a professional photograph. The meaning and consequences of her decision are at the emotional center of this compelling book, whose author sought out and came to know Marion Post Walcott and, in further preparation for understanding her life and work, traveled extensively to find the people she herself had so perceptively and movingly photographed.”

Source: https://www.paulhendrickson.org/looking-for-the-light

“Looking for the Light taught me to pay attention, that details matter, and that like both Wolcott and her biographer, we all have the power to bear witness. We have the power to go and see and feel and share what we felt. When we do this we often say we’ve been moved. Taken literally that implies starting in one place and ending up in another. It is the basis of all social change.”

–Bill Shore

Women Photojournalists: Marion Post Wolcott – Biographical Essay (Prints and Photographs Reading Room, Library of Congress). Her work (just a sampling from Connecticut): Slums in Hartford, Connecticut. Freight depot. Hartford. Merritt Parkway to New Haven. Children shining shoes on street corner, Hartford.

She captured images in Kentucky, Iowa, Virginia, West Virginia. Fixed flats and found her way, undaunted and the results are phenomenal. Art, as in Cornshocks and fences on farm near Marion, Virginia. Florida. New Hampshire. Mare and mule coltin Alabama. (Not only are the images amazing, but the words that accompany each are accurate, precise.)

There's a blizzard in Aspen, Colorado. A post office in Ellisville, Mississippi. A barbershop, store and post office in Homestead, Montana. “W.D. Anglin cultivating his corn with his pair of mares.” Transylvania Project, Louisiana. A fish fry. Football. Games. She's not afraid of people, places, what might have been overlooked. She gets in close too.

Wheels more like wagon wheels than car wheels as they appear today. Wood heat. Using the snow to slide heavy loads when it really snowed and stayed.

As in houses, land, trails. People and choices. History matters. What is now becomes then in seconds. A shell contained vibrancy, then the energy slips and flows elsewhere.

The red saltbox looked empty, forlorn, when passing by on a recent drive to Danielson, Connecticut. Drifting up as the roadtrip continued were vivid shards of time interviewing inside a warm studio that was a former chicken coop. Outside were plumes of steam as maple syrup was being made inside a nearby barn.

Sun, snow and Shetland pony. #Shetland pic.twitter.com/eslYFCNbHT

— Catherine Munro (@CatherineMMunro) January 17, 2024

59-years ago. Jeez. I remember watching Cronkite on the night Churchill died. Never did I think then, not for a second, that I would someday have a beautiful daughter, a lawyer no less, pointing to a bio I wrote of Winston Churchill. Life is strange, and beautiful, eh? pic.twitter.com/ivqium3nMn

— Paul Reid (@Paul_Reid2) January 25, 2024

Well said. For an overview of life in East Hartford as seen by Post Wolcott, start with this one.