Old color photos published

Almost every painting, photograph or drawing done in the mid-20th century has at least one thing in common: a lack of color. Most art before the 1970s was done in black and white. That's what makes the Charles Weever Cuchman collection so unique. \nAmateur photographer Charles Weever Cushman took color images of everyday life between 1938 and 1969. These photos were all taken using Kodachrome film. Eric Sandweiss, IU's Carmony Associate Professor of History, wrote in an essay on the Cushman Collection Web site, that the photos transformed "a world that we had long-since resigned ourselves to viewing only in shades of gray."\nIU has recently received a federal grant to digitize the photos and post them on a Web site for all to see.\n"There was a federal competition, (for the National Leadership Grant) and IU applied for it," said Eric Bartheld, associate director at the Office of External Relations and Development. "The Institute of Museum and Library Services perceived IU as a leader in this area that could help other libraries in the country."\nThere are about 18,000 slides on the Web site, all taken by Cushman. Each photograph appears as it was taken, with a small handful that were restored after they had begun to fade. \nThe Kodachrome film that Cushman used was introduced in 1936, but was rarely utilized. Before Kodachrome, there were other methods of color, but this was the first with such clarity, speed, exposure latitude and tight grain. It was a more natural color, and nothing like it in photography had been seen before, said documentary photographer Rich Remsberg in his essay about Cushman's work throughout his life.\n"Cushman's pictures are so unusual because they are in color," Bartheld said. "Most pictures of that era were in black and white, so to see them in color is amazing."\nThe online project has two goals: first, to preserve and digitize 18,000 Kodachrome Slides of scenes that have almost always been seen in black and white, and second, to create a "finding aid" to categorize the photos.\n"Cushman took such detailed notes on his photos that they were very easy to categorize," Bartheld said. "They are organized several ways -- by year, subject, location, year, genre, even roll of film."\nThis collection holds interest for historians, photographers, researches and art students alike. The images portray times that have been forgotten, sequences of events that have never been seen in such vivid colors and bring back the past.\n"We know, whether from our own memories or from history books, that people's lives changed enormously from the 1930s to the 1960s, but we forget the extent to which their surroundings remained the same," Sandweiss said.\nWith this project on the Internet, it will serve as a prototype for other institutions so that they, too, can present similar collections. It will also provide a model for similar finding systems to be created to categorize visual information.\nThe pictures in the collection are very interesting because they cover such a long period of time and so many different areas. Although Cushman took special interest in the Chicago and San Francisco areas, there are also images of urban slums, Jewish jewelry shops and hundreds of others. \n"The collection is a photographic document of American social history in the 20th century," Remsberg writes. "Charles Cushman's photographs comprise a vast sweep, covering a large portion of the United States -- and to some extent other countries -- in a span covering five decades." \n-- Contact staff writer Lee Cleary at lgcleary@indiana.edu.