John Vachon
1918 - 1975
Archive contact: Ann Vachon (AVachon@limon.org)
John Vachon (Born May 18, 1914, died January 1975) grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota. After graduating from St. Thomas Aquinas College he started graduate school at Catholic University in Washington DC, but was expelled for drinking on campus. Roy Stryker hired him as a file clerk for the Farm Security Administration, supposedly because he had no ambitions to become a photographer. After a year on the job, Vachon persuaded Stryker to let him document scenes in the District of Columbia. When the Washington Post published some of his pictures, Stryker began to give him assignments. While on an extended trip in the mid-west, Vachon decided "that he would photograph only what pleased or astonished him, and in the way he wanted to see it."
He followed Stryker to Standard Oil in New York, took photographs of American gas stations and oil wells, and made his first trip out of the country, to Venezuela. After a brief army stint during World War II, he was recruited by UNRRA to photograph relief efforts in Poland. In 1948 he joined the staff of Look Magazine, where he was a staff photographer for twenty-one years, completing an estimated 175 picture stories and more than two thousand published photos. The range of his subjects included war, politics, race, poverty, sports, fashion, religion, and science. These stories took him around the world, from Tibet to the Antarctic, from the Texas panhandle to Paris, France, and included visits with Carl Sandberg, J. Robert Openheimer, Pete Seeger, Marilyn Monroe, John F. Kennedy, Artie Shaw, Sonny Liston, to name a few. After Look folded, Vachon continued as a freelancer, and received a Guggenheim Fellowship to photograph North Dakota. He died of cancer in 1975 at the age of sixty.