The FSA-OWI photography of John Vachon

Beaumont, Texas. Miss Helen McCabe, a bus driver. John Vachon. May, 1943.



People always ask about the lady bus driver on the cover of the chapbook version on Down Spooky. I found this photo in the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress, which is an astoundingly cool and extensive online collection of photographs, sheet music, printed adversiting, ephemera, oral histories, and more.



The photographer, John Vachon, was unknown to me when I selected this image for the chapbook. According to his biography at the Farm Security Administration (FSA) Photography Project online, "John Vachon (1914- ) was originally hired in 1936 by the FSA as an 'assistant messenger' and one responsibility was to catalogue the pictures which were being taken. The more photos he catalogued the more his interest in photography grew. He was hired as a photographer in 1938. His contribution to the FSA Arthurdale collection consists of one photo. He later became a professional photographer for Look magazine, under Rothstein, and produced feature stories for almost twenty years."



The goal of the FSA Photography Project was to document American life--and from 1935-1943, a troupe of photographers directed by Roy Emerson Stryker did just that, amassing more than 270,000 negatives and 77,000 prints. In 1942, facing wartime budget constraints, the project was transformed into an extension of the Office of War Information (OWI). The FSA-OWI project also employed Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, and others. Rothstein & Vachon would go on to work for Look magazine, and of course, everybody knows Evans.



I'm particularly attracted to Vachon's work for the project because he was stationed for a while in Texas, capturing the "war wives" and women working jobs vacated by men who'd gone to war, in Beaumont (where hubby was born), Lufkin, and Amarillo. Here are John Vachon's photos from the project. I just love them.



I am thinking about all this because I am trying to come up with a couple of paragraphs for the designer who's been assigned my book! Not because I want to use this image, but because I am trying to articulate why I chose it, hoping that will help me articulate what I'd like. I feel lucky to be asked (another FANTASTIC thing about independent presses), but also tempted to simply point to the poems as the best articulation.



But I'll get it!