Photographer John Vachon

Biography adapted from various sources.

American, born 1914, died 1975.

John Vachon was born in St-Paul, Minnesota, on 19th May 1914. After graduating from Cretin High School he studied at the University of St. Thomas. He graduated in 1934 and managed to find work as a filing clerk for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington DC. Then, in 1936, the head of the photographic unit, Roy Stryker, promoted Vachon to be a photographer in training. He joined a distiquished group that included Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, Charlotte Brooks, Carl Mydans, Ben Shahn and others. Vacon was enthralled by his older colleagues and once paid a taxi driver to take him up and down streets in Atlanta until he found the same billboards that Walker Evans had photographed a couple of years before.

In 1937, Vachon was assigned to cover life in Omaha, Nebraska. He found himself photographing the strong verticals of a grain elevator with the strong horizontal of a box car in front. He thought he was merely reproducing the "genious of Walker Evans and Charrles Sheeler welded into one supreme photographic statement… Then it occurred to me that it was I who was looking at that 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 of seeing with a camera. I knew that I would photograph only what pleased or astonished my eye, and only in the way I saw it." With that photograph, Vachon developed a love affair with the Great Plains and found excuses throughout his career to get back.

When World War II started, the FSA morphed into the Office of War Information, and Vachon continued working for them until the agency was disbanded in 1943. By that time, Roy Stryker had been hired by Standard Oil of New Jersey to establish the same type of photographic unit that he had set up in the FSA. Vachon worked for Stryker between 1943 and 1944. Then, he served in the Army for the last year of the war. Between 1945 and 1947 he photographed New Jersey and Venezuela for Standard Oil, and Poland for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, the agency trying to save the lives of refugees. Vachon became a staff photographer for Life magazine, where he worked between 1947 and 1949.

Eventually, he moved from Life to LOOK, and began a 25 year career for the magazine. His old colleague from the FSA, Arthur Rothstein, became chief photographer for the magazine. Like all the staff photographers, Vachon covered the celebrities, sports heroes, and newsmakers. But he also specialized in stories about families struggling with poverty.

When LOOK folded in 1971, Vachon took free-lance assignments for several magazines. He also was a visiting professor at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. John Vachon died in New York on 20th April 1975.