Marion Post was born on June 7, 1910, in Bloomfield, New Jersey, into a middle-class family that would shape her progressive, independent outlook.
Marion Post was born on June 7, 1910, in Bloomfield, New Jersey, to a family whose unconventional dynamics — her physician father and her mother, a nurse and early birth-control advocate who eventually separated from him — exposed her early to progressive social ideas.
Her upbringing, split between her parents' influence and time spent with her older sister Helen (who introduced her to modern art, dance, and photography circles in New York and Europe), gave her an unusually cosmopolitan and socially conscious education for a woman of her era. This background planted the seeds for the empathetic, socially engaged eye she would later bring to documentary photography.
Though no single event on this date marks a public achievement, her birth is the foundational milestone of a life that would go on to produce one of the most significant bodies of Depression-era documentary photography in American history. Her later career, especially her work for the Farm Security Administration, would make her one of the most celebrated female photojournalists of the twentieth century, and her story continues to be studied as a testament to women's contributions to photography and social documentation.
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