Eric Sandweiss at Collected Works Bookstore

Event Description

Collected Works features Eric Sandweiss for a reading and slide show on his book, The Day In Its Color: Charles Cushman's Photographic Journey Across 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 a window. Eric Sandweiss' book The Day in Its Color introduces readers to Cushman's extraordinary work and a recently unearthed archive of his work: 14,500 color photographs, most shot on vivid Kodachrome stock. From 1938-1969, Cushman travelled 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. This well-preserved collection is all the more remarkable for having gone undiscovered for decades. What makes the photos most valuable, however, is the wide range of subjects, landscapes, and moods it captures--snapshots of a lost America as yet untouched by a homogenizing overlay of interstate highways, urban renewal, chain stores, and suburban development--a world of hand-painted signs, state fairs, ramshackle shops, small town living and bustling urban scenes. The book also reveals the fascinating and startling life story of the man who stood, unseen, on the other side of the lens, surely one of America's most impressive amateur photographers and outsider artists. With over 150 gorgeous color prints, The Day in Its Color gives readers one of the most evocative visual histories of mid-20th century America.

Author Eric Sandweiss is the current Carmony Chair of History at Indiana University. A graduate of Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley, he has been the recipient of a myriad of honors including a Fulbright Award and aSmithsonian Fellowship. His research interests include urban studies, architecture, and visual culture. In addition to The Day in Its Color, he is the author of St. Louis: The Evolution of an American Urban Landscape.