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

Eric Sandweiss

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.	1
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	2
What caught my eye when I began looking at Charles Cushman's slides three years ago was less the faces than the backdrop against which they appeared—a midcentury American landscape that I had long before resigned myself to knowing only in shades of gray. Cushman's vivid images revealed a bygone world of Main Street stores, slum tenements, and farm fields that seemed, for a startling moment, as close and real as the street outside my window. Never mind the people, I thought; how should I make sense of this startling place around them?	3
Eventually, though, these otherwise unremarkable portraits came to seem vital markers of an important journey. This was not just America, after all, it was the Cushmans' America—and here were the Cushmans, encountered at various stages along a road that took them not only from coast to coast but from youth to old age. Framing the passages of their lives was evidence of a larger sort of passage—one that commenced in the concrete-and-iron landscape of extraction, production, and face-to-face trade that characterized early-twentieth-century America and petered out amid the ambiguous spatial order of a postindustrial age. Like a photograph exposed for maximal depth of field, the story of those juxtaposed personal and national journeys required a long gaze before both the subjects and their surrounding context came into focus.	4
Charles W. Cushman and Jean Cushman in front of the Wofford Hotel, Miami Beach, Florida, March 1939. Photo by Charles W. Cushman. Courtesy Indiana University Archives, Charles W. Cushman Collection, PO1590.   . . . There are about 4886 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.