August Read: Two Photographers

Iowa : WPA Federal Art Project

John Vachon's America: Photographs and Letters from the Depression to World War II; edited, and introductory texts, by Miles Orvell, 2003

Walker Evans: A Biography; by Belinda Rathbone, 1995

Along with the Library of Congress, WPA poster collection, LC's other great WPA image resource is the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information [FSA/OWI] photography archive.

(All photos and captions below are found there.)

Browsing recently, I saw a lot of striking images by John Vachon. A younger colleague of Evans and other, better-known FSA photographers, Vachon died in 1975 (as did Evans). His work has slowly gained more recognition, and this recent book of photographs, biographical and critical notes, plus some of Vachon's own writing, is a valuable appraisal of his career during the FSA/OWI years.

After being expelled from graduate school, Vachon was hired by Roy Stryker, head of the historical section of the Resettlement Administration [the RA, which later became the FSA]. The year was 1936; national picture magazines like Life and Look were reaching a mass readership, and photography was becoming central to the era's culture. Stryker devised a plan for RA staff to rally support for agency projects—and to illustrate the need for the New Deal itself—by photographing and distributing images of conditions around the country.

Vachon first worked at captioning photos. He had wanted to become a writer, and had not felt any particular interest in photography. Yet he had also been drawn to drawing and painting, and his writing showed strong visual observation.

As he came to know the agency's file, he offered to fill gaps by taking pictures around DC in his spare time. Stryker agreed; Vachon borrowed a camera and started out with guidance from Arthur Rothstein. Walker Evans also took an interest, insisting that Vachon learn to use a view camera.

Vachon would work six years, traveling much of the country, and becoming perhaps the most prolific of the agency's photographers. [Not all are digitized, but the LC site shows 5000 holdings of Vachon images]. Among reasons for the historical importance of this work, Miles Orvell finds that

Because Vachon worked for the FSA-OWI as long as did, his work forms a narrative from the despair and desolation of the Depression to the energy and mobilization of World War II.

In the summer of 1935, Walker Evans began the first assignment of his WPA employment: traveling through West Virginia to document homestead and cooperative projects initiated by the RA. In Belinda Rathbone's account, Evans found himself in a setting ideal for the approach he had been developing—

In the mining towns, deserted and depressed... the small company towns sprawling over the landscape, once thriving, now bankrupt, he saw through the American dream of an egalitarian society to its core of melancholy.

Scott's Run mining camps near Morgantown, West Virginia. 1935

It's a key quality of Evans' work, particularly during the Depression.

Son of an adman,

Evans also had an intuitive grasp of the ad world, a sense of the immediate present, and a talent for puns and double-entendres much like his father's gift for the catchy phrase. But unlike his father, he... [had] a sense of the emptiness and pathos that such things so quickly acquire with age.

Vachon's work also captures that "core of melancholy"—

Shack on the edge of the city dump, Dubuque, Iowa. 1940.

Advertising, Woodbine, Iowa. 1940

Cincinnati, Ohio. 1938

National Association of Manufacturers sign, Dubuque, Iowa. 1940

Roy Stryker was careful to soften socially critical work that might inspire political interference with his agency. Though Stryker insisted years later that there had been no pictures taken of strikes, the LC archive has Vachon photos of determined workers on picket lines.

From Dubuque, Vachon wrote to Stryker of his shock at seeing the city dump, where men foraged for food and lived in nearby shacks. There, in Orvell's words, Vachon recorded "with unflinching curiousity and empathy, the shocking reality of Depression life at the margins." He would later photograph subjects like the faces of homeless men in city missions, and African-American families maintaining dignity in the most impoverished of settings.

Unfortunately, many LC scans have poor detail, but plates in Orvell's book are beautifully printed (in Canada). Even in a setting staged to promote the agency's activities—Farmer applying to county supervisor for Farm Security Administration loan. Oskaloosa, Kansas—Vachon records a despairing man, who seems to shrink under the official's complacent gaze; his wife sits in the background, her body twisted in anxiety.

Vachon developed something of a father-son relationship with Stryker, while struggling to become independent. Under the strong artistic influence of Evans and the other FSA masters who had become his teachers, Vachon also struggled to develop his own approach.

Stryker tends to comes across as an impresario of what was often a kitsch Americana, giving staff "shooting scripts" of desired images. Belinda Rathbone quotes from one Stryker directive—to bring back shots of—

Bill posters; sign painters — crowd watching a window sign being painted, ... parade watching, ticker tape; roller skating; spooners — neckers; mowing the front lawn... the kind of things that a scholar a hundred years from now is going to wonder about.

While employed by Stryker, Evans characteristically worked at his own pace. He stalled on deadlines and fended off Stryker's nagging about trip expenses, until finally turning in work to fit his assignments. During his tenure Evans managed to collect enough pay to keep going—no small accomplishment for the times—while pursuing his own vision. This included Evans' and James Agee's 1936 trip to rural Alabama, where they undertook the work that would become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Rathbone's excellent biography traces Evans' artistic development, examining both his family background and early creative influences. He had wanted to become a writer, but given a camera at about age fifteen, he also became fascinated by photography. He approached picture-taking as a "detective looking for clues." This seems to have been a reaction to his home life; his father had around this time left the family—moving across the street, to live with his divorced lover and her children—a situation never openly discussed.

When he began reading modernist writers, the teen-aged Evans gained a sense that there were ways of life other than his parents' upper middle-class façade. After moving to New York in his early twenties, he formed friendships with other aspiring artists, who joined Evans in photographing the city as a way of seeing it.

Late in the 1920s, he met Berenice Abbott, and through her discovered the work of Eugène Atget. Evans responded strongly, writing in a 1931 review—

His general note is lyrical understanding of the street... trained observation of it, special feeling for patina, eye for revealing detail, over all of which is thrown a poetry which is not "the poetry of the street" or "the poetry of Paris," but the projection of Atget's person.

For Evans, Atget evoked the "difference between a quaint evocation of the past and an open window looking straight down a stack of decades." This insight, writes Rathbone, was Evans' approach to analyzing "the elusive element of time in photography, which Atget had so mysteriously mastered."

In his work of the early Thirties, Rathbone finds that,

In drawing a distinction between the sentimental photography of the preceding generation and the pure documentary style that would soon overtake it, Evans made notable use of the metaphor of an open window and evoked a penetrating vista down through a "stack of decades." The receding vista, common to many of Atget's photographs, was becoming a particular interest of his. ...That his photographs saw through windows and porches and around corners gave them a new dimension and power and even an aura of revelation. They seemed to bring him closer to seeing into the past. In an old house in Copake, New York, he made a picture through one small room into another, which suggested a secret conversation between the dresser, the chair, and the Victorian portrait on the wall.

Like Atget's views of old Paris, Evans' photographs quietly animated the inanimate.

Church interior. Alabama or Tennessee. 1936

Evans worked for the FSA about two years; Vachon continued there as the war began and government photographers' work became focused on the war effort. In 1946 Vachon worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, photographing postwar conditions in Poland. Some of this work, edited by his daughter, Ann, was published in 1995 as Poland: 1946; The Photographs and Letters of John Vachon.

From 1947 to 1971 he was a staff photographer at Look, dubbed by his editors, their "photographer poet."

In 1954 he wrote the last entry in the journals he had kept since 1933, when he was nineteen and eager to write, or to create some kind of important art. Now he wrote of the conflict he felt, appreciating his luck at professional and travel opportunities, while observing of his Madison Avenue surroundings—

...I contribute, through my work with the magazine, to the thinking and forming of values which spread out from these stone buildings to the pliant acceptors of this false, refined civilization... though I say, truthfully, that I reject this civilization, and had rather been no part of it... I nevertheless rejoice in it, and pander to it, as I fly out in early morning airplanes to photograph a famous ballplayer in Evansville, Indiana, or to see a senator in Washington or Maine.

Orvell notes Vachon's attraction to the chance encounters of urban settings. In the evolution of the work, Orvell sees a link from the documentary approach of the Thirties, to the Fifties "snapshot aesthetic" of photographers like Robert Frank and Lee Frielander.

Magazines also provided Evans' income through the early 1970s. The conflict between that setting and his longing for independence, along with personal circumstances like two troubled marriages, fueled periods of problem drinking.

But Fortune seems to have given him freedom to make his own schedule and to do photo/text essays on subjects that interested him. Rathbone cites—

"'Downtown': A Last Look Backward," published in the August 1956 issue... Evans warned his readers that the district [lower Manhattan] would never be the same once a score of new construction projects then underway was completed. "The building boom now commencing," he predicted, "will change the face, and a good deal of the atmosphere, of the entire district."

...in March 1957, Evans produced "Before They Disappear," a photographic homage to the freight-car emblems he had loved since childhood. The portfolio, in color, showed the respectful attention to detail of a boy stamp collector; Evans knew when each emblem had first appeared and how it had been modified over the years..."

Rathbone concludes that—

While he mourned the loss of... treasures of his childhood, he argued vehemently against the idea that his photography might be driven by nostalgia... It was a sense of history in the rough he cherished, a sense that he had been better able to master in the days of the Depression, when America's material progress had stalled and the world stood still for his camera, poised for change. In the 1950s, an era that was loath to look backward, the meaning of Evans' enterprise hovered between one misinterpretation and another. He was not an aging social protest artist, nor was he a dewy-eyed sentimentalist. But there seemed to be fewer people around who knew what he was.

It was in the time when "the world stood still for his camera" that Evans' work was at its most affecting, and that the era found perhaps its greatest artist.

Fireplace in bedroom of Floyd Burroughs' cabin. Hale County, Alabama. 1936