On the Road with Charles W. Cushman

Holy discovery! Charles Weever Cushman, amateur photographer and Indiana University alumnus, bequeathed approximately 14,500 Kodachrome color slide...

Holy discovery!

Charles Weever Cushman, amateur photographer and Indiana University alumnus, bequeathed
approximately 14,500 Kodachrome color slides to his alma mater. The photographs in the collection
bridge a thirty-two year span from 1938 to 1969, during which time he extensively documented
the United States as well as other countries.

From an essay by Eric Sandweiss:

“For thirty years, Charles Cushman documented a dying landscape in living color.

Packing his car with camera, lenses, and film, his tripod, his
notebooks and–often as not–his first wife, Jean (who was not, to judge
from the expression on her face in Cushman’s occasional carside
portraits, always a happy traveling companion), this extraordinary
amateur photographer pursued a life on the road, and in the streets, of
mid-twentieth-century America. Whatever its effect upon his marriage,
Cushman’s peripatetic compulsion did result in a remarkable gift to
future historians, photography lovers, and students of Americana.

For
here, framed through the lens of his Contax IIA camera,
saturated in almost embarrassingly vivid colors, springs to life a
world that we had long since resigned ourselves to viewing only in
shades of gray. The America that we thought we knew, whether through
the self-conscious artistic starkness of the images of Berenice Abbott
and Walker Evans or through the polished middle-brow poses of Look
and Life, is revealed as being but the shadow of a world no less full
and tangible than our own. In Cushman’s work the past becomes, for an
instant, impossibly present.”

A mere five selects:

Hydrant Party, Hagerstown, Maryland, July 1940