The Day in Its Color

The America we drive through today is covered with interstate highways, suburban developments, and outlet malls, but there was a time when our country wasn’t entirely homogenized. Instead, it was made up of curious towns, individually owned shops, and hand-painted signs. We get the chance to be reacquainted with that lost America through an amateur photographer who brought the mid-twentieth century to life when he embarked on a cross-country road trip in 1938, taking pictures wherever he went.

THE DAY IN ITS COLOR: Charles Cushman's Photographic Journey through a Vanishing America (Oxford | March 2012) by Eric Sandweiss introduces readers to Charles Cushman's extraordinary work, a recently unearthed archive of 14,500 photographs, which is the largest known by a single photographer. From 1938-1969, Cushman travelled constantly, shooting almost everything he encountered on color-saturated Kodachrome stock, as he ventured from New York to New Orleans, Chicago to San Francisco, and everywhere in between. His photos include portraits, ethnographic studies, agricultural and industrial landscapes, movie sets, and thousands of street scenes, all precisely documented in time and place. The result is a chronicle of an era almost never seen in color. With over 150 prints, THE DAY IN ITS COLOR gives a visual history of mid-twentieth century America and reveals the life story of one of America's most impressive amateur photographers and outsider artists.