Events & Programs

It is never the thing but the version of the thing:/The fragrance of the woman not her self,/Her self in her manner not the solid block,/The day in its color not perpending time.

In the 1930s, American documentary photographers set out to show the real America—the “thing,” to borrow from poet Wallace Stevens, not “the version of the thing.”  In the works of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and other well-known professionals, Americans saw a Depression-era landscape stripped of fantasy and pretension—a gray collage of resolute faces, decaying rural crossroads, gritty city streets.

Not every photographer was looking for this America.  Among those who saw things differently was Charles Cushman, a semi-employed financial analyst with an obsession for cameras, cars, and women.  Cushman acquired his first roll of Kodachrome color film in 1938, for a trip across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.  Thirty years and some half-million miles later, Cushman pulled his car into the garage of his San Francisco apartment building, packed up his equipment and carefully filed away his color slides—14,500 of them, revealing a world that would soon lie submerged beneath a layer of interstate highways, urban renewal, franchised businesses, and automobile suburbs.  The pictures disappeared for three decades, before being rediscovered in an Indiana archive.

Cushman showed a dying world in living color:  the crowded rooming houses and sidewalks of the old inner cities, the small-town main streets, the one-lane country roads.  For its quantity, consistency, and breadth, we have no other collection of early color pictures like his.  This exhibition offers highlights drawn from the forthcoming book, The Day in Its Color:  Charles Cushman’s Photographic Journey through a Vanishing America, by historian Eric Sandweiss.  Come to the American Library in Paris and discover the story of an America that we have left behind, and of the man who devoted his life to revealing his day in its color.