In 1939, Wolcott traveled to Florida for the FSA to photograph migrant laborers and their families enduring harsh conditions on rural farms.
In 1939, as part of her ongoing work for the Farm Security Administration, Marion Post Wolcott traveled to Florida to document the lives of migrant agricultural laborers and their families. These workers, many of whom followed seasonal crop cycles, endured grueling working conditions, inadequate housing, and economic precarity that mirrored broader national struggles during the Great Depression.
Her photographs from this period captured both the harsh realities of migrant labor camps and moments of dignity, community, and resilience among the workers and their families. This work contributed to a growing public and governmental awareness of the plight of agricultural laborers, feeding into policy discussions about labor conditions and social welfare programs in the rural South.
The Florida series is considered an important component of her broader FSA portfolio, illustrating her commitment to portraying marginalized communities with empathy and journalistic rigor rather than sensationalism. It also reflects the geographic breadth of her FSA assignments, which took her across diverse regions of the American South. While the specific month of her Florida travel is not documented in available sources, 1939 is consistently cited as the year of this significant documentary effort.