December 08, 2003
A Speculative Slideshow
In July, 1941, Charles Cushman was ambling around the beach at Promontory Point in Chicago when he came upon a group of young women arranged in a spiral and using one another’s laps as pillows. They reminded him of spokes on a wheel. He took their picture, and noted the date and image in his notebook. It was a hot day, and the beach-goers were languid, facing the sea in perfect stillness. Charles felt something rushing in his heart, but he had no way to express it, so instead he tried to photograph it, reasoning that if he could make it permanent he might return to it at some later date and makes sense of it. But not today. He was a little more than a month shy of his 46th birthday, he had been out of work for four years, and he was unsure if there was any love left in his marriage.
Earlier that week he had spotted a woman sitting alone reading a magazine. She was not particularly young, but there was an openness to her features that attracted him. He approached and asked if he might take her photograph. She was friendly, and she blushed at the attention of the charming businessman who stood before her. “Here?” she asked. “Yes, this is fine.” The woman smiled, and Charles asked if she minded standing on the wall so he could get a few shots of the sea behind her. She brushed her dress modestly, laid her black purse on the rock to anchor the magazine, and stood up. “Is this ok?” She had a German accent, he noted, adjusting the lens. “Yes, that’s perfect.” She looked at the camera and he took this photograph.
“Another one?”
“Of course.”
“Smile,” he directed, and she laughed.
Those photos, along with the picture of the girls, are part of a collection of more than 14,500 photos the real Charles Cushman took between 1938 and 1969. He was born in 1895, married his first wife, Jean, in 1924, and worked in a variety middle-management positions throughout his career. For thirty years he carried his camera with him on business trips and vacations and strolls, documenting what he saw along the way. He died in 1972, leaving the collection to his Alma Mater, Indiana University, where it stayed in storage until 1999. The collection in now indexed and available online. Aside from the pictures, very little is known about the man.
The woman with the accent was named Anni Sokal, and in his notebook he elaborated, "discovered on Promontory P. 55 th St,” and the date, June 24th, 1941, a Saturday. He had taken pictures of many women, but there was something different about this one. Her gaze said something he had not captured before. The first encounter led to others. Later that week he took this picture, then this one. Finally, days later, this one. In his notebook he wrote, Anni Beckons.
What happened between Charles and Anni in the blurred days of summer on Promontory Point? When he took the first picture, did he offer to bring a print back on Friday? Did he invite her for lunch? Between the first photos on the sea-wall and the last photo on the beach they have become accustomed to one another. What happened in the intervening days?
Charles was a married man. His wife, Jean, traveled with him frequently, and appears in the collection like a guilty conscious. She is awkward in front of the camera. When he posed her it was usually at a distance, or in the car. Once in a while he used her to indicate the scale of something, a giant rock in one, or a cactus in another. Of the 14,500 photos in the collection, only around 100 feature Jean, and in most of them her expression is keyed somewhere between irritation and resignation.
On their wedding anniversary in 1950 he took this picture. What is she telling him here? Is she furious at her husband, or the camera? Or is she just tired?
In July, 1941, Anni from Düsseldorf vanishes from the collection. New women appear to take her place. There’s nothing to be gleaned from these pictures. The women appear and then vanish like the scenic lookouts Charles dutifully stopped to capture on his trips across the county. They represent chance encounters, fleeting acquaintances, pretty girls on the beach.
Still, it is tempting to read into these photos, to look at these as a record of his desires. So little is known about the man – I want to think that there was more to him than his road trips and his clerkships and his unremarkable marriage. I’d like to imagine that the saturated life he captured across the country somehow bled back into him.
On September 5th, 1946, on the same beach in Chicago, Charles took some pictures of a woman identified as Jean Neal. If you had to invent a story based on these, and you were feeling generous, you might describe a love affair.
I am making this all up. There is nothing to suggest that he was actually having affairs. The dates from his notebook are inconsistent, the collection was likely incomplete. He was probably just snapping pictures of friendly women who didn’t mind casting glamorous looks at a middle-aged man. Charles wasn’t creating a memoir, he was documenting the times. There isn’t a narrative of his life here, there is nothing internal to be read. We can get behind his eyes, but we can’t turn around and know him. Whatever Charles was documenting, it was secondary to his life. You can follow the photographer across the country and see what he saw but you can’t really know anything about him.
In 1969, when the last rolls were taken, he might have wondered what someone viewing these pictures in the future might assume about him. He had already decided to leave the collection to the university. That in itself was difficult decision -- he was a private man -- but what could they really know about him based on snapshots? A person could map out his movements across the country. They might find that he went and watched the circus tents going up every year in Chicago. That in 1941 he traveled to New York in search of work and met some bums at South Ferry. But what would they ever really know about him? Would they be able to read the tragedy that befell him in 1950? Could they intuit why he took so many pictures of flowers? His favorite color? What would they think of the women he met between 1941 and 1945 on Promontory Point in Chicago? What would they make of Jean? Could they understand her? Could he?
The pictures stop in 1969, a few months before Jean’s death. By now his collection was unwieldy, impossible to display in a slide projector. Even he would have been a little overwhelmed by its scale, but when he examined the photos he must have noticed that in all of the changing landscapes the only constant was his wife.
These last photos were taken just a few months before Jean’s death, and looking at them it seems to me that Charles was in a melancholy state of mind. Gone are the lively street scenes, the roadside characters, the woman and children. The collection ends, instead, with dark thunderclouds brewing over the horizon. These are followed by a remarkable series of photos from the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts. In them, women mingle amongst brightly colored paintings next to a moat. I look at these pictures and get the sad sense that late in life this is what he wanted most – an audience to admire the sprawling collection of pictures he had amassed. But how could he ever display it, and who would ever be interested? He did not consider himself an artist, but what could he say about the boxes of pictures in his workroom? What were they?
The final photo is of a solitary swan on a river. It's moving towards the reeds – distant and receding,like Jean. Was he thinking of his dying wife when he took this picture? Of the long years they had spent together and his longings and betrayals? When he developed these last slides, did he take them home, put them in the projector, and show them to her? Or was it too late?
That's where the collection ends.
