Charles Cushman's photographic journey through a vanishing America

Charles Cushman (1896-1972) photographed a disappearing world in living color. Cushman's midcentury America--a place normally seen only through a scrim of gray--reveals itself as a place as vivid and real as the view through our window. This book introduces a recently unearthed archive of photographs that is the largest known body of early color photographs by a single photographer, 14,500 in all, most shot on vivid, color-saturated Kodachrome stock. From 1938-1969, Cushman--a sometime businessman and amateur photographer with an uncanny eye for everyday detail--traveled constantly, shooting everything he encountered 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 media events, children playing, laborers working, and thousands of street scenes, all precisely documented in time and place. The result is a chronicle of an era almost never seen, or even envisioned, in color.--From publisher description.