DURING THE LATE `30S AND EARLY `40S, A SMALL group of photographers in what became known as the Farm Security Administration was given a public-relations assignment of daunting proportions. They were asked to document America in photographs. The pictures they were asked to take-in sweepingly nonspecific directions from project chief Roy E. Stryker-were to show not only the New Deal-ing, resettling work of the government agency that paid their salaries but also the terribly depreciated conditions that spawned such a massive social reformation in the first place.
The group not only succeeded at what they were asked to do, they managed to redefine most of the prevailing notions about the potential and power of still photography. FSA photographers Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Dorothea Lange, Carl Mydans, Russell Lee, Jack Delano, Marion Post-Wolcott and Arthur Rothstein did a portrait of America during those pre-World War II years that was as galvanizing as it was historic. Theirs was the quintessential photo essay, an extraordinary body of work now residing in the Library of Congress. While much of that work was going on, John Vachon, my father, who had a job as a file clerk for the FSA`s photographic archives in Washington, felt stuck on the sidelines, itching to get into the action. He was convinced that his talents could be put to far better use if he were out on the road with the rest of the group, taking photographs instead of filing and sorting them.
Vachon had come to Washington, D.C., from his native Minnesota to attend Catholic University of America. A scholarship had been revoked because of a drinking incident, and when he looked for a job, the first one he applied for was assistant messenger boy in the Historical Unit of what was then the Resettlement Administration. It was a job that introduced him in 1936 to Stryker, to photography and to what would ultimately become his life`s work.
But it didn`t start out that way. Only after several years of cataloging, captioning and filing the photographs of the team in the field did Vachon work up the courage to ask if he might join them. Project leader Stryker was uncharacteristically accommodating. Telling Vachon to go ahead and try his hand, Stryker loaned him some equipment and encouraged him to take photographs on weekend trips in and around the capital. Walker Evans showed him how to use an 8-by-10 view camera. Ben Shahn introduced him to the far more portable 35- mm. Leica, and Jack Delano taught him how to use a Graflex.
By June 1941, Vachon`s salary was raised to $150 a month, and he was a junior photographer in the FSA. By then, he and his wife, Penny, had a 3-year- old daughter and another child on the way. Although painfully short on experience and sometimes on confidence, Vachon clearly relished being on the road, part of the photographic team that was doing a still documentary of America.
But no assignment gave him more pleasure than the short time he spent in Chicago in late June and early July 1941. This was a city he had never visited before and one filled with pleasures he had never experienced. The letters he wrote then to his wife, my mother, were filled with that exuberance. But also, they were filled with his occasional doubts. Sometimes he wondered whether he had somehow wandered into a profession for which he was totally unqualified. There were other times that he sounded as if he had finally figured the whole thing out and it wasn`t nearly as complex or intimidating as he`d thought it might be.
But of course it was. That was the nature of the assignment.
John Vachon took photographs for the next 30 years of his life, for Standard Oil, the United Nations, Look magazine and as a Guggenheim Fellow. Much of his subsequent work was powerful, telling and articulate. But seldom were his photographs any more of those things than when he was a novice, taking pictures in Chicago half a century ago for the government and the FSA. He was in Chicago then just briefly, but from these photos and the following excerpts of his letters, it is clear that he quickly and deeply fell in love with the city.
June 24, 1941
My dear Babe:
Here I got at 3:30 p.m. Chicago sure is magnifique. . . . This afternoon I took one of those long walks around town. About six miles of it, and I got sore feet. I saw a joint where a sign said ”Jimmy Noone Here Nightly.” So that`s me, tonight. Tomorrow I`ll give over mostly to swimming and sunning on those lovely Michigan Avenue beaches. You want me to have a good time, don`t you?
I wish you were here, dear.
John
June 25, 1941
Little flower:
No word from Stryker yet. But I enjoy waiting. In fact I`m having a wonderful time. Try as I will, it`s hard to keep it from being expensive, though. No $1.50 room has opened yet. So I pay $2 while I wait. Then food, car fares, incidentals, parking-they all cost high in this town. I`m almost beginning to worry again.
This is a lovely hotel. I`ve been playing Studs Lonigan all day. Maybe tonight I will play Bigger Thomas. . . . I can see sailboats from my window. I went down and listened to (clarinetist) Jimmy Noone last night. He`s in what is really a joint. Him, bass fiddle, drums, piano. He`s really a wonderful guy. Then I went to several other joints which had pianos or small combinations playing in them. There are hundreds of swell places like that, where you can sit at the bar and drink beer cheap.
This morning I slept until 9:30, walked with my Leica until noon. Then went into Brentano`s and saw lots of my pictures in state guides I hadn`t known they were in. Then on the bulletin board of the downtown library is the front cover of the magazine Defense with my grain elevator all over it. Very satisfying.
And I went to the Art Institute. Quite carried away. All the Renoir, Van Gogh, Seurat, etc., which I`d seen many times, I enjoyed, but more really terribly. I also got a kick out of a big exhibit of work of students.
As for you, when you finish up with this next baby, I wish you`d go to Helena Rubenstein. I want you to put on some class, like these Chicago dames up and down Michigan Avenue. Glamour, groomed, chic, not one careless of her appearance in a 100.
I love you and all you stand for.
John
June 29, 1941
Dearly beloved:
Yesterday I spent many hours contacting guys, and by 2 o`clock I was able to get started photographing. I took pictures of butter, eggs, meats, poultry in a mammoth cold-storage warehouse. Really mammoth. The temperature yesterday was 95 degrees, and I was sweating like a dish rag. I think I got good pictures there, and useful.
When I got back to the hotel, I called the man who was going to arrange for me to take pictures of fruits and vegetables. He told me to be at the market at 7:30 this morning; then Monday I would get the stockyards.
So I ate and went for a little walk. I went into a beautiful, modern, air-conditioned WGN studio with about 300 other people, for a quiz-show broadcast called ”Shoot the Works.” I tried awfully hard to get questioned, but they wouldn`t have me.
There is another broadcast open tonight called ”Chicagoland” -musical stuff. I think I`ll go.
Then I started home, feeling kind of happy about all the wonderful things in Chicago and planning to get to bed early, so`s to be at the market at 7:30 this morning. If I`d just gone down some other block, I wouldn`t have known about a bar called Tin Pan Alley and I`d have been at the market this morning. Tin Pan Alley had a sign out front: ”Baby Dodds and his drums here every night.”
So I hop in, about 10:30, and hop out at 3:30. But oh how wonderful! It`s just Baby and a girl called Lil Rucker at the piano. She plays in a Jelly Roll (Morton) style. Me and Baby talked and drank together between all their playing. We really got on swell.
He filled me up with anecdotes about Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll, his brother Johnny, Rex Stewart and Mugsy (Spanier). Tin Pan Alley is a small joint in the wall. But it was one of the happiest nights of my life, dear babe.
I spent all afternoon driving around town-up and down Indiana Avenue.-you sure see the real Studs Lonigan locale. Through the Black Belt, which is pretty horrible, Chinatown and around to the Ghetto (Maxwell Street), where they have streets full of open carts selling every damn thing in the world. A little energy expended plus a little dough would sure knock down some good phonograph records in many of the neighborhoods I`ve been in, but I guess I won`t.
Whoredome unlike anything you`ve ever seen. One place I drove by, two painted dames, in fleecy gowns standing in the doorway of a one-story shop, exposing themselves considerably, gave me the smile and beckon.
I am informed that there is a special delivery downstairs. Maybe it`s from my dear wife. That is what you are. Be good to my children. I go.
John
June 30, 1941
Mme.:
I saw a double feature today, at the Studio Theatre-Rex Harrison in
”School for Husbands” and Danielle Darrieux, if you know who I mean, in
”The Virgin Bride.” Very risque, hey?
I`ll never be able to get back to expensive living again. Why, I haven`t eaten in a place where you have to tip the waiter since Angelos, my first night in Pittsburgh. It`s Thompson`s twice a day for me. But if I get dough, I`ll allow myself just one of those big meals before I leave Chicago. Maybe two. Last night I sat in on an hour broadcast, Mutual Network, called
”Chicagoland Hour WGN Symphony”-orchestra, soloists, chorus, light opera, Jerome Kern; nothing much good, but it`s fun watching them put it across.
I love you.
Ramon
July 1, 1941
Dearest wife:
Tonight I saw a movie of the memorable variety: ”I Met a Murderer.”
Quite perfect. This morning, I was at the stockyards by 8 and got in a very good morning until about noon. I came back to the hotel, loaded films and returned to the stockyards, where I put in a whole afternoon arguing with Swift and Co. But I can`t take any pix in their packing plants.
Driving down Michigan Ave. in early morning, with sunny mist on big buildings and thousands of people driving fast-Oh, give it to me!
Jimmy Dorsey is at the College Inn.
I hope you are fine. Love.
Roger
July 4, 1941
Blossoming one:
Did I write to you yesterday? Yesterday morning I crawled about the huge market and took pictures of cabbage, cantaloupe, celery, peaches, oranges, spinach and other things which you put on your table. Gawdamighty, it`s big, and complicated. I got pix of the various commodities in very large quantities, but you can`t always tell what they are. Pix of trucks loading, hauling stuff away, and of the auctions, where commission merchants sit at desks in a big schoolroom and bid boisterously.
Yesterday afternoon, I tramped the downtown streets, photographing from the steps of the El, afternoon crowds, very pictorial stuff, I think, against the sun, with a red filter. Then I ate at Thompson`s as usual.
This morning I was at the stockyards pretty early, and pictured pigs, mostly.
I photographed bums, derelicts, on Clinton Street during the early afternoon. These are the guys who are not the pride of America. Maybe in the better social order, they would be different, but now they are awfully nasty to look at, drunken, unsalvageable-looking.
Well, sir, my paycheck came, and what do you think was its amount, covering the period from June 15 to July 1? Well, sir, it was $99.99. Ain`t that nice? That`s why I`m knocking me off a $1.39 bottle of muscatel.
It`s unfortunate that such good news came to me my last night in Chicago, when I`m getting up at 3:30 a.m. to go to the market. At that time I`ve gotta go get pictures of table produce being unloaded from trains, and a little later merchants looking it over before they go to the auction rooms.
Otherwise I would show you a celebration that would ring memorable. I would go to the Joseph Urban Room at the Congress, then I would have dinner at the Palmer House, go see ”My Sister Eileen,” to a set with Jimmy Dorsey at the College Inn, then go back to Tin Pan Alley and buy Baby a whole bunch of drinks.
How sad, to leave Chicago. I have had a wonderful week, and such dandy fun, and seeing so much going on. Cab drivers looking at maps of Russia and arguing about the war. One guy points and says that`s where his old man comes from. And all the snooty dames on Michigan Avenue that I want you to emulate. And a cop with a heavy Irish in his voice that everyone says ”Hello, Barney” to on his way home. I followed him eight blocks. He was just like he was a character in the movies. All the joints are so nice, and the clean cafeterias, and living here with a radio in your room, and swimming with the sun hot. Jeez, I like it. And the gal in the stockyards office who said, ”You can tell which way the wind is blowing by whether you smell pig s—, cow s— or hog s —.”
Give my dandy regards to all your relatives. As for you, I have nothing but uncontracting love.
I am your-
J
