A Hoosier native and longtime Chicago resident, Charles Cushman (1896–1972) was an amateur photographer with a diaristic turn of mind; he worked at various jobs—editor, statistician, bureaucrat—but photography was his consuming preoccupation. He took his first picture using Kodachrome slide film on September 3, 1938. The subject was his red Ford coupe, with San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. A shadowy figure in the car’s front seat is likely his wife, Jean. For the next 31 years, Cushman chronicled his cross-country journeys with a Contax IIA 35-millimeter camera, amassing a meticulously cataloged collection of 14,500 images and documenting an amazing cross-section of American and international subjects, from inner-city storefronts and industrial landscapes to candid portraits and botanical studies.
Cushman made most of the images in and around San Francisco and Chicago, where he lived for many years, with stops in New Orleans, New York, Miami and towns in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona, among others, and traveling extensively in Europe in the 60s. As writes Eric Sandweiss, IU Carmony Associate Professor of History, in an essay included on the collection’s Web site: ”Any single place in the mid-twentieth-century American landscape can be found documented in greater detail elsewhere than it is in the slides of Charles Cushman. But in no other single place that I know of does the sheer range of those places—across space, across time, across the intermeshed functional elements of city, suburb, and countryside—receive a fuller treatment than it does in these pictures. Charles Cushman’s sure compositional eye (he rarely took two exposures of the same scene), his meticulous note-taking and, most strikingly of all, his early commitment to working in color at a time when “serious” documentary work was done in black-and-white, all make this long-undiscovered collection a rich trove that can be mined for many years to come”.
The richly saturated Kodachrome slides add color to an era primarily recorded in black and white, “a world that we had long since resigned ourselves to viewing only in shades of gray.” “In Cushman’s work,” Sandweiss observes, “the past becomes, for an instant, impossibly present.” After his death, the slides eventually found their way to Indiana University, his alma mater, where an archive was created for on-line consultation: if our selection just whetted your appetite, you can reach it at the link below. But if you think that 14,500 pictures are maybe a little too much for a first look, you could prefer the multimedia presentation created by NPR that you can see and hear here. Check it out. It’s worth your time.
