John Vachon (1914 - 1975 )

John Vachon was born in St. Paul, Michigan and later worked as a filing clerk for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Although his job initially involved writing captions for other people’s pictures, his fellow employees urged him to take up photography himself. Roy Stryker (see below) recruited him to join the small group of photographers taking pictures for the Farm Security Administration.

After working on the FSA project, Vachon continued his association with Stryker by taking pictures for the Stand Oil of New Jersey project. Vachon’s interest was with the rural poor, and he took more pictures than any other photographer along Route 40 from New Castle, Delaware to Salt Lake City, Utah.(1)

After working for Stryker, Vachon continued to pursue his photographic interests, working for periodicals such as Life magazine. He died in New York City in 1975, having produced a body of work that forms an important resource for studies of American social history from the 1930s to the 1950s.

ROY STRYKER (1893-1975)

Although not a photographer himself, Roy Stryker was one of the most prominent figures in American documentary photography. He organized photographers to take pictures for projects such as the Farm Security Administration and Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (SONJ). The latter project, which took place from 1943 to 1950, documented the company’s operations in the field as well as other aspects of the oil industry in the 1940s. SONJ was the “largest photographic documentation project ever undertaken in America by anyone other than the federal government.”(2)

Stryker also worked on projects for the city of Pittsburgh and Jones & Laughlin Steel. He looked for individuals who could comprehend, relate to, and successfully photograph truck drivers, drillers, farmers, and local merchants. Stryker gave his photographers the individual freedom to approach their subjects with an eye for beauty as well as social consciousness. (TMB)

(1)Route 40 web site (see link below).

(2)Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh web site (see link below).

L.H. Adams, Burlington, New Jersey

L.H. Adams, the first farmer in Region I to receive a loan under the tenant purchase program, Burlington, New Jersey, August 1938. Photograph courtesy Library of Congress (see link below).

General Motors plant, Trenton, New Jersey, October 1941. Photograph courtesy Library of Congress (see film below).

General Motors plant, Trenton, New Jersey, October 1941. Photograph courtesy Library of Congress (see link below).

Among the photographs Vachon took in New Jersey are “L.H. Adams, Burlington, New Jersey,” a 1938 portrait of the first farmer in Region I to receive a loan under the tenant purchase program. He also documented the General Motors plant in Trenton in 1941.