John Vachon, the photographer, started at the Farm Security Administration (FSA) as an "assistant messenger" who had just arrived from his native Minnesota to attend college. His task was to maintain the FSA photographic files. His interest in photography grew and Roy Emerson Stryker, the creator of the unit told him, "When you do the filing, why don't you look at the pictures."

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. In addition to Shahn, Walker Evans and Arthur Rothstein guided him through the beginning steps. Vachon received little in the way of specifics as to what he was to photograph.

Starting in Omaha he fashioned an ongoing and complex story of the contrast of wealth and poverty by taking pictures of everyday people and events. From 1936 to 1943, John Vachon traveled across America as part of the FSA photography project and he documented the desperation he saw in the world of the Great Depression and the peoples resistance to the heavy hands of industry. His portraits of black and white Americans are among the very best images created by the FSA.

The Office of War Information (OWI) was created in 1942 and served as an important U.S. government propaganda agency during World War II. Stryker's section at the OWI had been transferred from the Department of Agriculture's Farm Security Administration (FSA) in late 1942. Stryker's FSA section is the source of the world-famous collection of documentary photographs.

Altogether, the combined FSA-OWI collection of photographs at the Library of Congress numbers about 172,000, most of which are in black-and-white.

This image is taken from "Bound for Glory, America in Color, 1939-1943" and you can find out more about FSA photographs by clicking on the book listed below

Medium : 1 transparency : color

Created/Published : April, 1942

Creator : John Vachon, photographer, 1914-1975

Part of the Farm Service Administration -- Office of War Information Collection housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

Availability: Usually ships in one week

Product #: fsac1a34284