Signs, Signs, Everywhere a Sign

My latest Flickr album features photographs of signs from across the United States taken by Carol M. Highsmith from the late 20^th century to the present day. In this blog post I’d like to focus on some older photos of signs taken for the Farm Security Administration in the late 1930s and early 1940s by John Vachon. Vachon is not as well-known as Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, or Walker Evans, but his output for the FSA is larger than the combined work of those three photographers.

In 1940, in Woodbine, Iowa, Vachon photographed a deteriorating billboard. His two close-up images show the poster peeling away to show the billboard below:

It seems to me that Vachon made new art from the damaged billboard. The extreme close-up of the mouth and eye is as good as any Pop Art from the 1960s. Near Mansfield, Ohio in 1941, Vachon photographed another billboard that had seen better days. A young girl from an earlier billboard peeks through the advertisement for beer:

Both of these sets of images show how billboards were often pasted one on top of the other. Another Vachon photo documents this process:

These photos show that Vachon had a great eye for detail. As was noted in the comments of a recent blog post, because his work often defied categorization, he was given his own category in the FSA subject classification system. (Vachon Photos – .96928) As close-ups of billboards would have been difficult to classify (assign to a specific subject), the three billboard photos that were printed for the FSA file were classified as “Vachon Photos.” For as long as I’ve worked with the FSA Collection I’ve been drawn to Vachon’s work. He often focuses on details or frames images in a different way.

For example, instead of showing the entire wall that includes the pillar, the alliteratively titled “Privy pump and pillar,” also from Woodbine, Iowa, and also classified as a part of “Vachon Photos,” shows just a corner of the building and some of the surrounding area. I think the photo can even qualify as including a sign:

I will leave you with one last Vachon sign photograph. This is a much more straightforward image of the famous Camel Cigarettes billboard in New York City, with Vachon catching the pilot mid puff:

Learn More:

• See the Flickr album Signs of America by Carol M. Highsmith.
• Read a blog post that features John Vachon: Double Take: Familiar Faces.
• Browse Vachon’s photographic work for the Farm Security Administration.
• Study the classification system for FSA photographs in the finding aid FSA/OWI Collection Subject Index.