Odette England, The Long Shadow: Unwrapped – Marion Post Wolcott’s Labor and Love, 2024

Wolcott was the first woman hired as a full-time photographer for the Farm Security Administration in 1938, during the American Great Depression. Three years later, after taking more than 9,000 photographs, Wolcott received an ultimatum from her husband Lee Wolcott and boss Roy Stryker: choose love or photography. Wolcott quit her job and spent 11 years managing three dairy farms in rural Virginia. She raised four children, did housework, milked cows, learned how to operate machinery, and repaired farmhouses. Wolcott was thought to have given up photography, but this assumption was wrong. The Long Shadow is a tribute to this female icon of photography.

Drawing on Wolcott’s archive of unpublished intimate portraits and through conversations with her family, Anglo-Australian photographer Odette England juxtaposes them with her own photographs and prose rewritten from interviews and historical documents.