Vachon is remembered most for his photography working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) as part of the New Deal and for contributions to Look magazine.

John Vachon was born on May 19, 1914, to a middle-class Irish Catholic Family in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

[4] Vachon moved to Washington, D.C., after receiving a fellowship to attend graduate school at Catholic University of America to study English literature and become a writer.

After his leave from graduate school, Vachon looked for work around Washington, D.C.,finding his first job in photography working for the Farm Security Administration's Historic Division as one of the photographers hired by Roy Stryker to document the plight of migrants during the Great Depression.

He wrote them to describe his experiences, ambitions, self-doubt, sense of humor, obligation to the FSA, the people he met, the news he read about, and the movies he watched.

[5] The FSA was a New Deal agency created in 1937 to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression in the United States.

The FSA is famous for its small but highly influential photography program which began in 1935 under its prior name and mission as the Resettlement Administration.

[9] Some FSA employees had well-established careers, while others become famous as photographers as a result of their work, including Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins, Marion Post Wolcott, Jack Delano, Arthur Rothstein, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, Carl Mydans, Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn.

His weekend photographs of "everything in the Potomac River valley"were clearly the work of a beginner, but Stryker lent him equipment and encouraged him to keep at it.

He photographed agricultural programs on behalf of the FSA's regional office and pursued an extra assignment from the photography project's chief, Roy Stryker: the city of Omaha.