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GREENSBORO — In April 1938, a 23-year-old novice photographer named John Vachon checked into the King Cotton Hotel armed with his camera, a supply of film and a historic assignment.

He’d come to town to take a portrait of America.

Vachon’s boss, a New Deal bureaucrat named Roy Stryker, had sent a team of photographers around the country to capture the face of the Depression.

The pictures they produced for the Farm Security Administration represent what some historians call the most comprehensive documentary collection ever compiled.

“They’re priceless,” Anita Price Davis, who has written about the Depression in North Carolina, said of the pictures. “Some of the best photographers came to our state.”

They included the likes of Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein and Dorothea Lange, among the most acclaimed picture takers of the 20th century.

Today, 165,000 of their images can be accessed through the Library of Congress, including hundreds taken in North Carolina.

The project initially focused on rural life, but over time came to show conditions in the nation’s small towns and cities as well.

Stryker called the project “introducing America to Americans.”

The North Carolina photos include destitute sharecroppers, farmers selling their tobacco, a family living in a barn, a Rotary club dinner, men playing checkers, a church social and scenes from the 1939 Duke-Carolina football game.

“They show us what life was like at the time,” said Beverly Brannan, a curator at the Library of Congress. “To have a visual memory reinforces the oral traditions and enables people to visualize scenes they never lived through.”

The photos appeared in newspapers, magazines, state guidebooks, hardbacks and exhibitions.

Vachon came to his role as an FSA photographer by accident.

“He turned into ... a superbly good one,” Stryker said in an interview in the early 1960s. “He’s what I’ve said many times is the only 'congenital photographer’ that I ever realized we had.”

Vachon had joined the FSA in 1936 as an assistant messenger. He needed the job, according to a story in a 1989 issue of American Heritage magazine, because a drinking bout had cost him his scholarship at Catholic University of America in Washington, where he had studied literature. He had wanted to be a poet.

“He sort of became a poet with a camera,” Brannan said. “His pictures are lyrical.”

In 1937, he began filing the work that the photographers would submit. Eventually, he began to notice their skills.

“Roy Stryker decided he would like to mold a photographer in his own image,” Vachon once recounted. “He put a camera in my hand, breathed on me and told me to see what I could do, but only on the weekends, of course.”

Stryker began to give Vachon photo assignments. But when Vachon arrived in Greensboro in 1938, he still carried the title of junior file clerk and unofficial photographer, making $105 a month.

“I have some feeling for photographic work, though I think our particular brand a little over-rated,” he wrote in his journal that year. “I might be able to do something with it sometime, that is something worthy, something of value.”

Although Vachon would later work for Life and Look magazines, taking pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, Billy Graham, Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy, it would be his assignments for the FSA that proved most valuable.

Vachon, a St. Paul, Minn., native, had come to Guilford County to photograph Nat Williamson, the first African American in the country to receive an FSA loan.

Williamson, 48, lived on a 97-acre farm near Gibsonville with his wife, Evannar, and their six children. His loan covered $2,350 to buy the land and $650 for repairs and construction of new buildings.

“The farmers, the poor ones, we’ve seen, both Negro and white, have all been swell people,” Vachon wrote to his mother during his visit to the state, which included stops in Raleigh and Goldsboro. “But the so-called upper class Southerners get awfully on my nerves.”

In addition to photographing Williamson, Vachon also took pictures of other farm families in the county, plus the exterior of a billiard hall and a police officer directing traffic in Greensboro, the post office in McLeansville and an outhouse in the countryside.

“He was photographing all kinds of people that nobody ever photographed,” said Joe Manning, a writer, photographer and historian in Florence, Mass., who has tracked down some of the descendants of the people Vachon photographed. “It’s a huge gallery of the American scene .... They must have had some innate sense that what they were photographing would one day be important.”

Vachon’s photos have been collected in two books, one by his daughter, Ann Vachon, and one by Miles Orvell, a professor at Temple University.

“I think he was less concerned with history than he was concerned with humanity,” Ann Vachon said of her father. “I think he was photographing the humanity he saw and that was the point he was making.”

Orvell, whose book is called “John Vachon’s America,” compares his subject favorably with Walker Evans.

“He deserved to be counted among the best of the FSA group,” Orvell said. “In his best work, we can see ... a photographer as good as anyone during this period.”

Vachon could also be called strange, too.

According to Thomas B. Morgan, who wrote the American Heritage story about Vachon, the photographer kept a record of every photo trip he ever took (456 in all), listed every airport used, every interstate train ridden and every state in which he got a haircut. He also kept track of how much time he spent in each state and, on a map in his apartment in New York, he marked off every county he ever visited.

Morgan, who worked with Vachon at Look, described his colleague this way in his story:

“John Vachon was a taciturn, brooding, hard-drinking man, a product of the Great Depression, who traveled about the American heartland and around the world for nearly 40 years, taking candid pictures of everyday realities in people’s lives.”

In the end, Morgan wrote, fame and fortune eluded Vachon. In 1975, he died broke.

Contact Donald W. Patterson at 373-7027 or don.patterson @news-record.com