The Day in Its Color: Charles Cushman's Photographic Journey through a Vanishing America

Abstract

What is there to say about a little-known traveling salesman, financial analyst, and amateur photographer captivated by America's fading storefronts and town squares, its bustling businesses and factories, and its sprawling vistas and suburbs? Plenty, according to Eric Sandweiss. By the time the amateur photographer Charles Cushman retired his Contax 11A 35mm camera after three decades and a half-million miles with his wife, Jean, on the open road, this native son of rural Indiana had produced 14,500 color slides. Cushman's vivid color photographs, taken from 1938 to 1969, represent, Sandweiss maintains, a “thirty-year experiment in color photography” (p. 13). Until the advent of Kodachrome color film, generations were schooled to see the photographic “past” chronicled in shades of black, white, and gray. For Sandweiss, Cushman's color slides speak a new language, a vernacular of immediacy that renders the past “impossibly present” (ibid.). This lavishly illustrated book opens a window on this transitional moment in American cultural history: a period of migration from rural, agrarian towns to bustling urban centers, and the rise of mass industry and commerce.