charles w. cushman's chicago

i spent hours pouring over thousands of stunning city of chicago images taken by charles cushman spanning the late 1930's to the late 1950's. i selected several images that impacted me in one form or another and compiled them together in the gallery below.

i strongly recommend setting aside an afternoon to freely explore cushman's remarkable photography (see link below). there is a dizzying array of content - in the form of many categories and subcategories that cover anything and everything.

charles cushman and kodachrome

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.

kodachrome, the first modern color film, was introduced in a 35mm still camera format in 1935 by the eastman koday company. there were earlier color processes, such as autochrome, but none had the clarity, speed, exposure latitude, or tight grain that kodachrome had. it was above all, a more natural color, and nothing like it in photography had been seen before.

breakthrough that it was, widespread use of kodachrome would not begin until after world war ii. it was expensive, still slower than most films, and often more difficult to expose than black and white film.

cushman began shooting with kodachrome as early as 1938. that was a year before the wizard of oz or the new york world's fair. the dust bowl had begun only four years earlier and was not yet over. there were still thousands of civil war veterans alive in 1938, and television would not begin regular color broadcasts for another thirteen years.

looking at cushman's photographs today, their immediacy is striking. we are used to seeing images from that era—and of those subjects—only in black and white.

an interesting comparison is cushman's color images of chicago in the late 1930's and early 1940's with the black-and-white images of the same city—sometimes the same neighborhoods—made by the farm security administration (fsa) photographers around the same time. the difference in the emotional response and sense of connection for those of us seeing cushman's color slides in the early twenty-first century is powerful and a very different experience than seeing black and white pictures of similar situations.

about the cushman collection and photographic equipment used

the cushman slides series collection comprises about three cubic feet, or a little more than 14,400 color kodachrome slides shot from sep. 3, 1938 to april 20, 1969. the slides have all been removed from cushman's original slide storage cases and reboxed in gaylord brand slide file cases. slides that had originally been glass-mounted were removed and transferred to wess brand plastic slide mounts.

in the camera equipment series, there is one cubic feet of camera equipment, which consists of cushman's contax iia camera made by zeiss icon; a carl zeiss sonnar f/1.5 50mm lens, a carl zeiss sonnar f/4 135mm telephoto lens, a photrix s.s. light meter, 135mm view finders, and various other equipment including his leather camera bag, a tripod, and a sampling of two of the cases that cushman had originally stored his slides in.

for more information on this amazing collection, please click here.