We’ve had plans to share the Charles W. Cushman collection with you for some time, but we kept putting it off somehow.
Lately, though, we’ve seen photographs from the collection featured on a number of other websites, so we figured we’d better act now, before the entire Cladrite community has encountered Cushman’s work elsewhere.
Cushman was an amateur photographer and devoted traveler who resided in Indiana. Late in life, he bequeathed his collection of nearly 14,000 photographic slides to his alma mater, the University of Indiana. And bless their hearts, the good folks at IU have made a substantial portion of the collection—literally thousands of photographs—viewable online (prints can be purchased at reasonable rates, too, which we think is dandy—we’re proud owners of an 8×10 print of the Chinatown shot seen below).
The photographs in the collection were shot from 1938 to 1969, which would make them intriguing to us in any case, but the fact that they’re in color renders them true treasures.
We’re sharing with you some of our favorites from among Cushman’s color images of New York City in the 1940s, but don’t be satisfied by this small offering. Cushman traveled the world, and there are many more of Cushman’s images to be savored at the IU website and on Flickr.