Marion Post Wolcott died on November 24, 1990, in Santa Barbara, California, leaving behind a legacy as one of America's foremost documentary photographers.
Marion Post Wolcott died on November 24, 1990, in Santa Barbara, California, at the age of 80. By the time of her death, her reputation as one of the most significant documentary photographers of the Great Depression era had been firmly reestablished, following decades in which her work had been relatively overlooked in favor of male contemporaries like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange.
In the years leading up to her death, renewed scholarly and curatorial interest — including retrospective exhibitions and publications in the 1970s and 1980s — brought her Farm Security Administration photographs back into public view, earning her long-overdue recognition for her contributions to American visual history and to the advancement of women in photojournalism.
Her death marked the end of a life that had spanned some of the most transformative decades of the twentieth century, from the Great Depression through the postwar era and into the modern age of photographic scholarship. Today, her photographs are held in major institutional collections, including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and continue to be exhibited and studied as essential records of rural American life and as evidence of women's important, if historically underrecognized, contributions to documentary photography.