Vachon came to Poland for the first time just after the war on behalf of the American government. He documented the assistance provided to Poland after World War II as part of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). During half a year of his stay in Poland, Vachon took several hundred photos. He photographed a country devastated by war and people hard hit by fate. Apart from Warsaw, he also visited many other cities, such as: Gdańsk, Katowice, Wrocław, Kraków, as well as many smaller towns and villages, where he saw destruction, ruins and unimaginable poverty caused by the occupier and warfare. He watched how Poles, with great effort, commitment and energy, arranged their houses and workshops in the ruins, rebuilt schools, hospitals, factories, shops, ports, airports, and how they returned from forced labor from Germany and exile in Siberia. Vachon also witnessed the changes taking place in Poland. He documented the atmosphere of the country in the conditions of the nascent new regime imposed by the communists.
Vachon's next two visits to Poland, in 1956 and 1963, were related to his work for the New York illustrated magazine "Look". The articles published there brought American readers closer to the realities of our country. Vachon returned to the places where he had been during his first visit, looking for similar atmospheres. The photos from 1956 show Warsaw destroyed after the war and its inhabitants undertaking the effort of rebuilding their lives. Numerous ruins in the capital remind us that only a dozen or so years ago the country experienced a cataclysm. Vachon photographed e.g. in FSO, schools, hospitals, theatres, cafes, museums, at trade union congresses and in the Sejm. He was particularly fascinated by the Palace of Culture and Science, a symbol of the ongoing changes, which he captured in many frames - a monumental building towering over Warsaw, shining with white stone walls - in a place where a few years earlier there was a heap of rubble and a few surviving tenement houses.
During his next stay in Poland, the photographer made a series of color slides for Look magazine. A unique thing for the period when this material was created. Probably one of the few photos of Warsaw from the first half of the 1960s, taken and preserved in color. Gomułka's little stabilization in full bloom. You can see the ruins, but it also looks more like a modern, rebuilt capital - there are already private taxis, well-tailored suits, colorfully dressed youth, jazz is listened to in student clubs, avant-garde paintings of socialist artists hung on the old town wall. A noteworthy sequence is a series of photos of the then 25-year-old actress Beata Tyszkiewicz, a rising star of Polish cinema.
