Vachon had lucked into a crap job in one of the most remarkable government agencies of the Depression—the Farm Security Administration, working under Roy Stryker, the economist and photographer responsible for some of the most endearing images in American photography, through the work his photographers shot while criss-crossing the country during the Depression.
Stryker’s photographers included geniuses like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn. John Vachon was not a genius; he started for the FSA’s Resettlement Agency with no idea what it did and no interest in photography. But the daily exposure to the FSA archives gave him an appreciation for the form: “Well, within a few months I got interested in the pictures themselves, and began to know one photographer’s work from the other, and admire certain pictures. It was in the spring of the next year, ‘37, when I asked Stryker if I could use a camera just to see what I could do with it, which I had never in my life done or wanted to do.” Access to Stryker and his incredible team made the learning curve a lot easier for Vachon.
He learned on the job, in concert with county agents who helped him gain access to the people he photographed, mostly rural enclaves. But in the summers of 1940 and 1941, Vachon passed through Chicago, where he put his abilities as a street portraitist across a broad range of people, capturing the elegance and poverty of the central city during wartime.
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/July-2012/Chicago-Life-During-Wartime-The-Photographs-of-John-Vachon/?mode=popup&cp=10&view=slideshow
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