Baltimore, Maryland, USA
(John Vachon / Library of Congress)
John Vachon, together with such names as Roy Stryker, Mary Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange, was a key photographer for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The FSA, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal, was established to work towards alleviating the deep poverty experienced across rural America during the Great Depression.
Vachon never set out to be a photographer; the first job he took at the FSA was as an administrative assistant, doing the filing. A large proportion of the filing was photographs documenting the effects of the Depression on Americans’ lives, which inspired Vachon to experiment with taking images himself. Encouraged by other FSA photographers, Vachon’s first significant solo photographic assignment came at the end of 1938, in Nebraska.
Photography was to be his career: after the FSA with the Office of War Information, then in-house at Standard Oil. For two years from 1947, he was a staff photographer at Life magazine, followed by a quarter of a century at Look magazine. Vachon’s images, and those of his colleagues, are perhaps the most significant legacy of the FSA.
‘When you do the filing, why don’t you look at the pictures?’
Roy Stryker to John Vachon
