John Vachon, Alabama and Marilyn Monroe

Having been a Marilyn Monroe fan for many years--well, decades, really--I've been looking for an Alabama connection to write about on this blog. However tenuous it may be, I've found one, so here we go.

Back in December 2014 I did a blog post on some photographs of downtown Gadsden taken in December 1940. The photographer was John Vachon. In a collection of his letters Vachon noted in one that he stayed at the Gadsden Hotel on Friday and Saturday nights for that December visit.

I wrote a bit about his biography in that post. "Vachon was one of a number of photographers who traveled America from 1935 until 1945 documenting conditions and activities during the Depression and WWII for the U.S. Farm Security Administration and the Office of War Information. He worked for the OWI in 1942 and 1943. Almost 8300 of his photographs can be seen here. Vachon was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1914 and died in 1975." 

After the war Vachon continued to work as a photographer until his death. He was a staff photographer at Life magazine from 1947 until 1949. He also worked at Look magazine from 1947 until it ceased publication in 1971. 

In March 1943 Vachon took a number of photographs in Montgomery that turn up in the Yale University resource cited above. There's also one from Evergreen in that same month and two from Birmingham in December 1940. You can see a few below. Thus he seems to have made at least two trips to Alabama.

Now about that Monroe connection. In mid-August 1953 Vachon went to Banff in Alberta, Canada, where the film River of No Return starring Monroe and Robert Mitchum was being shot. Marilyn was recovering from an accident; she had her left ankle wrapped and was using crutches. Yet within a few days Vachon managed to take a number of formal and candid photographs. Unfortunately, only a few were used by Look for an article "Location Loafing" in the October 1953 issue. The remainder went unseen until many years later when the book Marilyn, August 1953: The Lost Look Photographs was published in 2010. 

In September after Marilyn returned to Los Angeles, Look sent another photographer and some of those shots were included in the November issue, including on the cover. That photographer was Milton Greene. The two became friends, and by 1957 in some 53 sessions Greene took many of the most iconic photos of the actress. 

A few of Vachon's Alabama and Marilyn photos are below. The Library of Congress has a large collection of his papers etc. Daughter Christine Vachon is an independent film producer.  



Further Reading


Andersen, Kurt. The Photographs of John Vachon, 2010

Vachon, John. John Vachon's America: Photographs and Letters from the Depression to World War II. 2003

Wallis, Brian and John Vachon. Marilyn, August 1953: The Lost Look Photos. 2010

John Vachon in 1943

Source: Wikipedia

A truck driver refuels in Evergreen at three a.m. on his route from Montgomery to Mobile

Source: Yale Photogrammar

"Peace be unto you" sign at a Birmingham steel plant December 1940

Source: Yale Photogrammar

A woman sweeping leaves in Birmingham in December 1940

Source: Yale Photogrammar

Confederate monument at the state capitol grounds in Montgomery March 1943

Source: Yale Photogrammar

Montgomery truck driver Marvin Johnson reads the "funnies" to his children, March 1943

Source: Yale Photogrammar

Source: Blog post by Tara Hanks 31 January 2011. The post has much information about the session in Canada and many more photos.

Birmingham Photos of the Day (43): By Walker Evans in 1936

Walker Evans [1903-1975] was one of the great documentary photographers of the twentieth century. Evans made three brief trips to Alabama during his career, in March and the summer of 1936 and again in 1973. The images he recorded on the 1936 visits are among the most iconic Great Depression photographs taken in the United States. 

His most famous photos were taken in Hale County that summer. In the previous year Evans had been working for the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal program that was part of recovery efforts during the Great Depression. Evans traveled to various places, including the South, documenting agricultural and industrial life and work. 

In summer 1936 writer James Agee accepted an assignment from Fortune magazine to write about sharecroppers in the Deep South. Agee wanted Evans to accompany him, so the photographer took a leave from the federal agency. The two men spent eight weeks in the Alabama summer living primarily with three sharecropping families. The manuscript Agee delivered to Fortune was much longer than the magazine would publish; it eventually became the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men published in 1941. Agee's singing prose about the daily lives of these desperately poor but proud people, and Evans' images make reading the book an unforgettable experience.    

Evans' third trip to Alabama came in 1973 when he and artist and photographer William Christenberry, an Alabama native, toured Hale County. Some of the color photographs Evans took on that trip appeared with Christenberry's in a museum exhibition "Of Time and Place" as well as the exhibit's catalog. 

Evans' first trip to the state may have been late in 1935. Some of the photographs below are dated in that year, others in March 1936 and some just 1936. Whatever the exact dates, these images capture indelible scenes from the city's past. 

The three photos below that feature a steel mill seem to capture the Ensley Works. Take a look at the photograph on the BhamWiki site here and see what you think.

Unless otherwise noted, all photographs are from the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Birmingham steel workers

A similar shot of steel workers with Coca-Cola sign fully visible

Front entrance of a boarding house in Birmingham

Steel mill with workers' houses in the foreground

Roadside stand in the Birmingham vicinity

Source: ArtsMia 

Miners' houses near Birmingham

Another angle on those miners' houses

Company owned steel workers' houses

Birmingham Photos of the Day (25): "World's Highest Standard of Living"

The two photographs below were taken by Arthur Rothstein in February 1937 during his swing through Alabama for the Farm Security Administration. During the Great Depression the FSA sent a number of male and female photographers around the country to document conditions especially--but not exclusively--in rural areas. I've discussed his Birmingham photo of a barber shop in a previous blog post and his photos of area migrant workers in another. I'll be posting more of his work in a future item about FSA photographers in Alabama.

In trips in September 1935, February 1937 and June 1942, Rothstein took more than 600 hundred photographs in the state, ranging from Jackson County to Mobile. About half that number were taken in June 1942 to document the war effort for the Office of War Information. A number of his Birmingham photographs taken on the 1937 visit relate to coal mining.

I have yet to identify the buildings seen in these two photos, especially the second one. The sign company is identified as the General Outdoor Advertising [Advertisement?] Company and may be the one listed here. However, that company filed as a "foreign corporation" [meaning out of state] in Alabama in 1963; the filing has since been "withdrawn". Yet a token celebrating the silver anniversary of this same Chicago company in 1950 can be seen here. Since that company started in 1925, perhaps it is indeed the one identified in these photographs.

More than 170,000 photographs taken by FSA and OWI photographers have been made available by Yale University. They are an incredible resource.