"The Day in Its Color": Charles and Jean Cushman

Abstract

Their names are Charles and Jean Cushman. The place is the Hotel Wofford in Miami Beach, Florida; the date, sometime in March 1939. The Cushmans have traveled here from Chicago, Illinois, in a maroon Ford Deluxe sedan, which they will soon drive north to visit her parents in their red-brick townhouse in Washington, D.C. We know the color of the car and the house, as we know the details of their itinerary, because of what he keeps beside him on the front seat as they drive: a new Contax IIA 35-mm camera, some canisters of Kodachrome color film, and a small spiral-bound notebook filled with handwritten annotations of every picture that he has shot. From shortly before the time of this picture until 1969, this amateur photographer and sometime financial analyst, accompanied by his wife, drove roughly a half-million miles across the nation. He wore out three automobiles and produced fourteen thousand color transparencies along the way?pictures with no apparent intended audience beyond that small circle of friends and relatives whom one might dare invite to a Saturday-night home slide show. Among those pictures are a small number of portraits?including a very few, such as this one, for which the photographer used a tripod and timer to reveal himself to the camera.1