Alumnus discovers 2,000 photo slides, completes collection

IU’s Office of Archives and Records Management collection of Charles Cushman photo slides is complete, thanks to the nearly 2,000 slides discovered by Rich Remsberg.

An IU alumnus, Cushman was famous for his Kodachrome photographs of 20th-century America.

It was a portion of these photo slides that Remsberg, another alumnus, found in the office of a former professor.

Remsberg came across the slides while helping a soon-to-retire professor clean out his office. He said he noticed the high quality of the photos when he viewed them on a slide projector with a friend.

“I was struck by how good they were,” Remsberg said. “I didn’t know anything about the photographer, but I knew that this was uncommon.”

After debuting some of the slides at a poetry reading, Kathy Parker, former development officer at the IU School of Journalism, approached Remsberg.

She identified the photos as Cushman’s and gave Remsberg contact information for Cushman’s widow, Elizabeth.

Remsberg said he learned how popular Cushman’s work was when he spoke with Brad Cook, photograph curator at the archives.

When Cook casually mentioned Cushman’s name in reference to an archive collection, Remsberg said his “head spun around.”

The archives house about 12,500 of Cushman’s colored and black-and-white slide collection.

It also includes the notebooks Cushman left behind, which describe the circumstances and environment of every photo.

Cook explained that when Cushman died in 1972, his wife sent the majority of his
photograph collection to the archives. She later found more photos and sent them to the IU Foundation.

Unsure of what to do with the slides, the foundation gave them to a professor — the professor whose office Remsberg found the slides in.

While the slides are in cold storage in the archives and rarely brought out, all of Cushman’s colored photos can be viewed online at this link.

The digitization of the photos was made possible by a grant given to the library by the Institute of Museum and Library Services in 2000. After receiving the grant, Kristine Brancolini and several other team members worked for three years to publish the photos online.

Cushman’s work remains in demand today.

“There is not a week goes by that I don’t get a request for a publication or a print of Cushman’s work,” Cook said.