Fields of Vision: The Photographs of John Vachon The Library of Congress
Introduction by Kurt Andersen. Series statement by W. Ralph Eubanks. Series editor Amy Pastan
Published by GILES in association with the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C.
Publish Date — April 2010 (UK and USA)
Dimensions — 64 pages, 180 x 180 mm (7 1/8 x 7 1/8 in.)
Illustrations — 50 colour illustrations
Paperback price — UK£6.95/US$12.95
ISBN — 1-904832-47-4
ISBN — 978-1-904832-47-8
Book Details (pdf) — FOV2-AI-LR2.pdf
Trade Orders — Please visit our Trade Orders section
Press Release — Fields of Vision: evocative images of a vanished...
Sales Points
“[W]e are today making a conscious effort to preserve in permanent media the fact and appearance of the 20th century” to “leave for the future a very living
document of our age, of what people today look like, of what they do and build.” John Vachon
“The greatness of Vachon’s portrait of America is that it’s not a happy-all-the-time Bedford Falls nor a ghastly Pottersville, neither propagandistically pro- nor anti-American, but achieves some truer, more complicated, liminal version of the nation at midcentury” Kurt Andersen in the introduction to Fields of Vision: The Photographs of John Vachon
About the Book
Providing a unique view of American life during the Great Depression and Second World War, each Fields of Vision volume includes an introduction to the life of a Farm Security Administration (FSA)/Office of War Information (OWI) photographer with 50 evocative images selected from their work in the Library of Congress's collection. Transporting the viewer to American homes, farms, and streets of the 1930s and 1940s, they offer a glimpse of a new narrative and intimate style that defined America.
John Vachon was born in Minnesota in 1914. He joined the FSA in 1936 as an assistant messenger and became an official photographer in 1941. Unlike the photographs of most of his FSA peers, many of Vachon's are distinctly urban. In 1947 he started shooting for Life and Look magazines, and remained as a staff photographer at Look until it closed in 1971. He died in 1975.
