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Move Over Vivian Maier, Hyde Park Has Its Own Obscure Photographer

 Charles Cushman's 14,500 photographs have all been archived and digitized by Indiana University.
Charles Cushman Collection
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HYDE PARK — Move over Vivian Maier, Hyde Park has its own quixotic and obscure photographer who captured some rare images of the city during massive transitions.

Charles Cushman was a financial analyst who amassed a portfolio of more than 14,500 color slides during long seemingly aimless wanderings around the South Side during the 1940s.

The images catch in a rare burst of Kodachrome color the final days of the city before it was sliced up by new expressways and slums were bulldozed to make way for massive new public housing developments.

Unlike the now well-known images of Chicago street photographer Vivian Maier, Cushman brought an economists’ eye to the camera that recognized and documented the last days of an urban system about to be thrown into upheaval by the end of World War II.

“I think he saw landscapes in term of the big trends in the American economy,” said professor Eric Sandweiss, author of “The Day in Its Color: Charles Cushman's Photographic Journey through a Vanishing America” and chairman of the department of history at Indiana University, where Cushman’s work is housed in the university's archives.

Cushman would spend sunny days wandering away from Hyde Park with his Contax IIa. And when he did, he managed to capture some of the only known color images of the ornate brownstones and greystones that would soon be torn down to make way for the Illinois Institute of Technology and Lake Meadows Apartments.


These rowhouses in the 3200 block of South Rhodes Avenue were torn down when Lake Meadows Apartments were being built and the street no longer even exists. [Charles Cushman Photography Collection, Indiana University Libraries]

“He really knew the South Side and when he really starts going out it’s partially to get away from his life and a lot of it is around the time when urban renewal is about to be happening,” Sandweiss said.

Cushman was living with his wife, Jean, with his in-laws and it’s unclear whether his seemingly solitary trips to the circus or a train exposition had anything to do with his father-in-law, Joseph Hamilton.

“He was literally a larger than life character — because he is a character in ‘East of Eden,’” Sandweiss said.

Hamilton was a mentor to Cushman and also his nephew, John Steinbeck, who based a character on him for his 1952 novel.

Hamilton also must have played an outsized role in his daughter Jean’s life as well because a little over a month after he died in 1943, she tried to kill herself.

Jean Cushman would later tell police in the hospital that she couldn’t live without her father and assumed her husband couldn’t live without her, which is why she shot Charles Cushman twice in the head before turning the gun on herself.


Charles and Jean Cushman in Portland, Ore., in 1938.

Both survived and surprisingly stayed together and continued their regular drives around the country until Jean’s death in 1969.

“They survived with bullets lodged in their heads driving around the country together,” Sandweiss said.

That they stayed together creates even more unanswerable questions, like the story behind two photos taken on Christmas Day in 1946 at the University of Chicago’s hospital. Cushman’s note simply reads, “Shadow of lamp shade on wall of Room A 318 Billings Hospital.”

It also lends a sadness to Cushman’s photos of college-age women sunbathers at Promontory Point, one of the only times he ever approached anyone with his camera and asked to take a photo.

“He’s middle-aged and married to a psychologically wounded woman so there is some longing to it,” Sandweiss said.

The sunbathers have become some of Cushman’s best known work, but his landscapes and architecture photos have also found renewed interest since the archive was opened.


Maria Grygier at Promontory Point in 1949.

Brad Cook, the curator of photography at the Indiana University Libraries, said he’s received requests to reprint Cushman’s photos on everything from pillows to purses.

He said a French company licensed Cushman’s photos for a line of pillows and clothing company H&M used one of his photos of Chicago in recent years for a T-shirt. He said he still gets calls every week about using the photos and recently has been getting calls about using photos from Cushman’s trip to Istanbul from people in the Middle East.

Cook said there were still more than 500 black-and-white photos to digitize, and more might be from Cushman’s time in Chicago.

Cushman left Chicago in 1952 for San Francisco, a place where he never seemed to feel as compelled to explore the neighborhoods like he had in Chicago.

All 14,500 images are available and searchable online at the Charles W. Cushman Photography Collection at Indiana University.


The Hawthorn Apartments at 33rd Place and Rhodes Avenue were demolished when Lake Meadows Apartments was being built.


Maxwell Street in 1958.

Scudding mist on the Calumet River in 1941 viewed from the 92nd Street bridge.

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