"The Day In Its Color": a Technicolor look back at mid-century America

The Day in Its Color introduces readers to Charles Cushman’s extraordinary thirty-year work, an archive of 14,000 Kodachrome photos housed at Indiana University. The photographs, most shot on vivid, color-saturated Kodachrome stock from 1938 to 1969, are the visual record Cushman captured as he travelled constantly, photographing everything he encountered from New York to New Orleans, Chicago to San Francisco.

Cushman, the sometime salesman and non-professional photographer, traveled by auto across US highways before the Interstate system, built in the 1950s, eventually made cross-continental road travel a blur of exit signs and chain restaurants. The result is a chronicle of an era almost never seen in color beyond souvenir postcards and chamber-of-commerce brochures. 

What was America like at mid-century, at city-street level and country-crossroad? As one reviewer of The Day In Its Color expressed it, "Imagine Berenice Abbott or Walker Evans in technicolor." Our collective images of the 1940s, so dominated by black-and-white war photography and dustbowl portraiture, now have a dimension on view in vivid color:  Cushman's photos include portraits and everyday streetscapes, ethnographic studies, agricultural and industrial landscapes, movie sets and media events, children playing, laborers working, all precisely documented in time and place. The result is a chronicle of an era almost never seen or seldom envisioned in color. 

 Charles Cushman, 1939

The book's editor, Eric Sandweiss of Indiana University, selected one hundred fifty images from Cushman's collection. Viewing the original slides and prints was revelatory: in a recent post Sandweiss compares the experience to how people must have felt stepping into the land of Oz in a movie theater in 1939:

Pulling the little Kodachromes out of their slide boxes, I realized how thoroughly the gray shades that, for me, defined America before the late 1950s had, like a theatre scrim, distanced me from the experience of everyday lives lived before my own. Each black and white picture, I realized, reminds you that it is a document — not the thing itself. It pronounces its own pastness before you’ve even made it present. Laid out on the light table, glowing as bright as the room around them, the color slides quickly sucked me into an opposite fallacy: thinking that I was closer to the places pictured within them than I could ever be. “The day in its color,” to quote the poet Wallace Stevens, had come to seem the world itself.

In his archive of images Charles Cushman (1896-1972) preserves mid-century America as a place as vivid as the view out our own window. The collection is all the more remarkable for having gone undiscovered for decades. What makes the photos valuable is the wide range of subjects, landscapes, and moods it captures -- snapshots of America as yet untouched by an overlay of interstate highways, urban renewal, chain stores, and suburban development.

Atlanta, Christmas 1951

America is revealed as a world of hand-painted signs, state fairs, and ramshackle shops, small town living and bustling urban scenes before corporations began to stake claim on every street corner. (Although there were exceptions: Coca-Cola wasn't about to let Atlanta forget its hometown roots, above.) The book also reveals the fascinating and startling life story of the man who stood, unseen, on the other side of the lens, as one of America's most busy amateur photographers. 

To create a now-and-then contrast to Cushman's work, Sandweiss embarked on his own cross-country journey to the same vistas captured in the photographs. In Atlanta, the round Coca-Cola "Neon Spectacular" lit up the foot of Peachtree Street from 1948 to 1981. Today, hotels and office buildings dominate a more demure downtown streetscape, if just as busy. In his recent blog series Sandweiss comments on what has been lost in the intervening 70-plus years of road-travel in the American imagination:

 Tucson Rodeo Day, 1940

Route 66 exists so completely in our literary memories, our imaginations, our online search options, that even the faintest of efforts can serve to satisfy the curiosity that took a man of his generation many years to settle. As with every other aspect of our networked world, such access cuts both ways. While access to information democratizes our ability to fashion a coherent picture of the landscape, it furthers the atomization of our social and spatial selves. 

Locked in our homes, we open Google Maps for a 360-degree view of any square foot of the highway. On our GPS devices and our Mapquest searches, we break down the full experience of travel into a million randomly ranked impressions; “continue west 734.5 miles” takes up less space in our brains than “south 37 feet to unmarked intersection, take a soft right onto eastbound access road.” We know everything and we know nothing about the spaces through which we move.

Clinton Street, Manhattan, 1941

As Sandweiss comments in his post about the photographer as documentarian, "Like most Americans of his day, Charles Cushman was neither preservationist nor modernist. He enjoyed pieces of both past and present, using his camera to assemble a picture of his 'day in its color,' and seldom peering incisively into the shadows of class or race inequality or environmental degradation that lay beneath its surface. Cushman does not ask that we rush to his side in defense of these sites of imminent change, but neither do his pictures suggest confidence that something better awaits. His job (and his real job, at that) was to predict where the market was headed, not to take it there." What we take for granted in our everyday lives always disappears, replaced by some other building, some other idea, some other usefulness: we'd all better have that camera ready.

Photographer Reuben Cox and "The Work of Joe Webb" (2009)

Mention "photography in the south" and a certain imagery of decay leaps to mind: steel-gray clouds in a black-and-white sky, weather-beaten clapboard, the forgotten faces of Appalachia -- as if the ghosts of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were still documenting the slow turning of the human soul south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Or perhaps it's here that William Faulkner's "the past isn't really dead" is more truth than aphorism; maybe the inexorable and ultimate reconstruction that progress brings hasn't yet removed all traces of the past that linger in the south, and which Reuben Cox is drawn to capture.

The North Carolina artist whose website offers a welcome and a request ("welcome to my mosque ... please wipe your muddy mind before entering") is a photographer, luthier, portraitist; his photo subjects range from the ephemera of the soul to whorls of river water to the graffiti-plastered walls of the now-closed CBGB's, documenting the passage of the temporal in sharply-rendered images of both beauty and clarity.

image from Record Shack collection, Reuben Cox

His human subjects challenge the camera's eye, rather than divert their attention from it. Their assurance in the captured moment is a personal statement, even in the seemingly offhand way Paul McCartney plays an upright piano and the potter Georgia Blizzard sits in window light loosely holding a carved Buddha in her lap.

image from The Work of Joe Webb, Reuben Cox (2009)

His book of photographs The Work of Joe Webb: Appalachian Master of Rustic Architecture (Jargon Books, 2009; distributed by the University of Georgia Press) is work that celebrates the craftsmanship of the Highlands, North Carolina woodworker and builder who created nearly thirty log cabins in the 1920s and 1930s. Cox's contemporary photographs -- taken with a large-format field camera -- reveal the houses in current states of repair, disuse, or unrecognizable renovation: a review in Blueprint calls the images "hallucinatory ... balustrades of thick, twisted twigs minimizing thickets; staircases constructedwith random patterns of interlocking laurel or rhododendron branches."

Though Cox's photographs of log cabins are beautiful documents of a physical past rapidly disappearing, his website offers other work showing Cox's interest in the metaphysics of belief.Everybody Wants to go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die is a series of evocative C-print photographs -- smoke evaporating into air, explosions caught in the moment of combustion, as if the human spirit had suddenly ignited and caught fire -- in settings of fall woods, in the dark of night, or against blue skies and skeletal trees.

image from "Everyone Wants to go to Heaven, But No One Wants to Die," Reuben Cox

Cox created these fleeting moments of flash and fire by experimenting with available light, gunpowder and shutter speed, and the results are unrepeatable instants captured reflexively on film. The ghostly and beautiful images can be unsettling reminders that life is momentary, that the nature of spiritual belief is a matter of individual faith and doubt, and that human nature is changeable as smoke even as the artist tries to capture man's nature against the impermanence of time.

The Jargon Society remains a valuable asset to the continuing memory of its founder (the "visionary coach and, at times, crank") Jonathan Williams, and now in the capable hands of Thomas Craven. Its stated goal is still "dedication to the care and preservation of the singular, the personal, the local, the individual. ... What other press would devote equal effort to White Trash Cooking and the collected poems of Lorine Neidecker at the same time?"' Williams's boundless energy in promoting the vast and largely unheralded wealth of American creativity was expressed in an interview with Leverett T. ("Sneaky Fast") Smith and posted at the Jargon Society website: in it, Williams declares “'There is no end to desire.' But, perhaps, there is an end to energy? I will try to go to the well as long as I think there is a drop of water in it."