By Eric Sandweiss
Charles Cushman has gotten me into some pretty tight spots. He’s dragged me through green pastures and led me beside still alleys. He’s drawn me closer than I cared to come to the shadow of death, as I weaved my car through freeway traffic with one eye on the road and the other on my map, one hand balancing a camera and the other tending to the steering wheel.
I didn’t know, when I started getting into those spots eight years ago, that I’d be following Cushman. As a historian of the built environment, I was after something else: the landscape of farms, small towns, and big cities that this part-time businessman photographed during the period from 1938 to 1969. I wanted to find the places Cushman had pictured, to learn how they’d weathered the transformations that had taken Americans from Depression, through war, and into a period of abundance.
I couldn’t help imagining that during that thirty-year interval, the nation had turned from gray to color. At least that’s how it had always seemed to a kid comparing the newest issue of Life, lying on the kitchen table (“Fonda’s Little Girl Jane as a Futuristic Space Traveler in the Movie ‘Barbarella’!”), with the clothbound early volumes of the same publication (“US Wins Race with Nazis for Brazilian Trade”) that he would pull off the shelves at the public library on a rainy Saturday afternoon.
It was many years after those library weekends that I found Cushman’s pictures. I was old enough to know better, but somewhere beneat