Artist: John Vachon (American, 1904-1975)
Title: Boy Hopping Freight Train
Date: 1940
Accession #: 00.08.17
Medium: Black and white photograph
Dimensions: 13 3/8 x 8 7/8 in.
Acquired by: William G. & Barbara Kruse
About the Artist and his Work: A native of Minnesota, Vachon was a student at Catholic University in Washington, DC, when he joined the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1936 as a messenger and file clerk. The FSA was headed by Roy Stryker, a Columbia University economics professor who wanted to make a pictorial record of the effect of the Great Depression on rural America. In April 1940, Vachon visited Dubuque and what he found here moved him deeply. Here was a picturesque Midwestern town that was experiencing the effects of the Depression as keenly, as harshly, as other parts of the country. Vachon photographed a man foraging for food in the dump, the derelict shantytowns located at the south of the city, and a ragged looking brother and sister huddled on a door stoop. He depicted the residents of Dubuque in a way he portrayed all of his subjects – mingling an unblinking interest with genuine compassion. It is easy to see in the Dubuque photographs and in the ten thousand other images he took for the FSA why Vachon was called a “poet photographer” later by his editors at Look magazine.