John Vachon's first job at the Farm Security Administration carried the title "assistant messenger." He was twenty-one, and had come to Washington from his native Minnesota to attend Catholic University of America. Vachon had no intention of becoming a photographer when he took the position in 1936, but as his responsibilities increased for maintaining the FSA photographic file, his interest in photography grew. A memoir by his son quotes Stryker as telling the file clerk, "When you do the filing, why don't you look at the pictures." ¹

"Nebraska is the white spot of the nation: no luxury tax, no bonded debt, highways all paid for..." LC-USF33-001295-M3

At the Armistice Day parade. LC-USF33-001306-M1

Cars and parking meters. LC-USF34-008964-D

By 1937 Vachon had looked enough to want to make photographs himself, and with advice from Ben Shahn he tried out a Leica in and around Washington. His weekend photographs of "everything in the Potomac River valley" were clearly the work of a beginner, but Stryker lent him equipment and encouraged him to keep at it.² Vachon received help as well from Walker Evans, who insisted that he master the view camera, and Arthur Rothstein, who took him along on a photographic assignment to the mountains of Virginia. In October and November 1938, Vachon traveled to Nebraska on his first extensive solo trip. He photographed agricultural programs on behalf of the FSA's regional office and pursued an extra assignment from Stryker: the city of Omaha.³

Stryker's instructions about what to photograph seem not to have been very detailed. Years later Vachon recalled that "my only clue was an article in a recent Harper's by George Leighton," a reference to a politically charged item in the magazine by the periodical's associate editor.⁴ The 1938 article traced the development of the Union Pacific and other railroads--for which Omaha was an important center--and the political machinations that made their builders millionaires. It also described Omaha's stockyards, owned by Chicagoans Swift, Cudahy, and Armour; the failed attempts of regional reformist and populist movements; a riot and the lynching of a black man; the nefarious influence of the absentee-owned Nebraska Power Company; and two infamous streetcar employees' strikes that had been put down by thugs from Benjamin Danbaum's detective service. Although Leighton ended his story with Depression hard times and the collapse of the city's businesses, his conclusion was optimistic: the New Deal's farm, soil, water, and power projects would bring hope to the parched plains.

Newsstand. LC-USF34-008939-D

On a streetcar. LC-USF33-001286-M5

Danbaum armored car. LC-USF34-008938-D

Leighton planned to publish a book containing this article and similar social histories of four other American cities, and Stryker wanted the book to be illustrated with Farm Security Administration photographs. As Vachon was leaving Lincoln for to Omaha, he wrote Stryker, "Are you going to send me a list of definite things Leighton would like from Omaha?"⁵ In a 1973 interview, Vachon recalled the Omaha assignment as a moment of artistic maturation:

I spent a cold November week in Omaha and walked a hundred miles. Was it Kearney Street where unemployed men sat all day on the steps of cheap hotels? A tattoo parlor, and the city mission with its soup kitchen. Men hanging around the stockyards. One morning I photographed a grain elevator: pure sun-brushed silo columns of cement rising from behind CB&Q freight car. The genius of Walker Evans and Charles Sheeler welded into one supreme photographic statement, I told myself. Then it occurred to me that it was I who was looking at the grain elevator. For the past year I had been sedulously aping the masters. And in Omaha I realized that I had developed my own style with the camera. I knew that I would photograph only what pleased me or astonished my eye, and only in the way I saw it.⁶

Oak bar from a more prosperous era. LC-USF34-008968-D

Flophouse on lower Douglas Street. LC-USF33-001311-M3

Unemployed men who ride the freight trains from Omaha to Kansas City and St. Louis and back. LC-USF34-008859-D

Vachon's Omaha take added 208 photographs to the file. The pictures suggest an act of exploration; looking at them, it is easy to imagine a young photographer under multiple influences--wanting to illustrate Leighton's article, responding to Stryker's standing order for general interest photographs, and seeking his own voice as an artist. The following year, Edward Steichen selected Vachon's signature photograph of the freight car and silos for a photographic annual.⁷

When Leighton's book was published in 1939, only five of Vachon's photographs were used.⁸ The volume is not heavily illustrated to begin with, but it is also true that Vachon's pictures do not offer perfect illustrations for the text. Leighton's scenes were set in the past, and many of their subjects--human and architectural--were no longer available to Vachon's camera. And Leighton's article is a single-minded chronicle of moral decay and economic collapse. While some of Vachon's images express these themes, others do not. His photographs of people, for example, include both portraits of Depression victims and scenes of comfortable everyday life. Vachon's notes for the caption of one of the photographs included here underscores the straitened circumstances of two transients he photographed on lower Douglas Street. "These men are both past 60," he wrote. "Neither of them expects to ever work again. They ride freight trains from Omaha to Kansas City to St. Louis and back again." ⁹ But in other photographs, kindly looking housewives tend their flowers or chat with the mailman.

The photographs that represent Leighton's ruling class do not contain clear-cut indictments of the forces of capitalism. Vachon's pictures of the former homes of the robber barons tell us more about wealth's mutability than about its venality. To make the photograph of a run-down mansion suit the tone of the book, Leighton added a lengthy caption that derided former owner John A. Creighton for installing a "liquoratory" and reported that the structure had become a boardinghouse. Two of Vachon's photographs juxtapose rows of small workers' houses with a billboard and a power plant that represent the absentee-owned Nebraska Power Company. The images succeed as descriptions of vernacular architecture but fail as statements of economic cause and effect. Although Vachon photographed a streetcar motorman, nothing in the picture suggests the long and difficult strike; only the photograph of strikebreaker Danbaum's detective van contains a hint of menace.

Blind beggar. LC-USF33-001307-M3

Saloon in the stockyard district. LC-USF34-008951-D

Restaurant sign. LC-USF33-001287-M2

The Omaha in Vachon's photographs is more varied and complex than the one in Leighton's text, but the photographer's broad coverage may in fact have been inspired by the attention the writer paid to the many levels of the city's society. Vachon's survey of architecture, ethnic signs, and downtown street scenes provides a cross section of the city. But Vachon's curiosity about how things look outstripped his intellectual involvement in history and sociology. His images of the ebb and flow of life on disorderly city streets anticipate the postwar generation of "street photographers," whose most famous exponent is Robert Frank.

The hallmark of this style of photography is the portrayal of people and places encountered on the street, unembellished by the beautifying contrivances used by calendar and public relations photographers. One influence on both Vachon and Frank was Walker Evans. Critic Jonathan Green's description of Evans's and Frank's choice of subject matter as what was "considered beneath notice" applies to Vachon as well: "images of the roadside, automobiles, gasoline stations, American flags in out-of-the-way places, barbershops, bums, billboards, luncheonettes, political posters, public monuments, and cemeteries." ¹⁰

High school student's car. LC-USF34-008904-D

In the wholesale district. LC-USF33-001277-M4

Boxcar and grain elevators. LC-USF34-008906-D

Vachon's pictures of Omaha's streets offer a personal vision of an imperfect world, and they solve the test he posed for himself when he first arrived in Nebraska. "Omaha looked swell this morning out the train window," he wrote Stryker two or three weeks before he returned to photograph the city. "Very unspectacular, and ordinary looking, but definitely camera-challenging."¹¹