Charles Cushman’s full-color 1940s New York City

When you’re used to seeing the mid-century city in grainy black and white or stylized shades of gray, Charles Weever Cushman’s vivid, explosive color photos are a revelation.

[Below: "Poverty, young and old, black and white," October 4, 1942]

An editor turned statistician from the Midwest who pursued photography as a hobby, Cushman traveled extensively and took photos wherever he went. From 1938 to 1969 he shot landscapes, landmarks, and ordinary people all across America.

But it’s his incredible scenes from the shopworn, slightly tattered nooks and corners of mostly World War II-era New York that are most captivating.

[Above: "Residents of lower Clinton Street near East River Saturday afternoon," September 27, 1941]

In these Kodachrome color images, he aimed his lens at corner bars and luncheonettes, pedestrians on stoops and sidewalks, and other bits of day-to-day life that may not have seemed so remarkable then but today feel poetic and serendipitous.

[Above: "A busy corner of Pearl Street at noon," October 7, 1942]

After his death in 1972, 14,500 of his Kodachrome slides were donated to his alma mater, Indiana University. The university digitized his entire collection.

[Below, "Three bums from South Ferry Flophouses" at Battery Park, June 6, 1941]

Cushman (below) kept detailed notes about each photo he took, but who he was and what he was hoping to preserve are shrouded in mystery. His second wife reportedly had this to say, via the biography about him on the Indiana University archives website:

“Charles was a shrewd individual . . . a sharp evaluator of people, and was very prudent and shrewd in his securities selection. He loved life—music, good books, sports, the outdoors, travel, integrity . . . and could not tolerate ignorance.”

[All photos copyright Charles W. Cushman Photography Collection/Indiana University Archives]

A photojournalist’s “subtle and whimsical” city

Andre Kertesz, born in Hungary in 1894, made a name for himself with his photos of fellow Austro-Hungarian soldiers in World War I.

“Unlike other war photographs, Kertesz’s concerned themselves with the lives of soldiers away from the fighting,” writes PBS.org’s American Masters website.

“Part of Kertesz’s genius was his ability to cast attention on images seemingly ‘unimportant.’ These subtle images of the moments of joy and contemplation away from the front were a revolutionary use of the newly invented hand-held camera.”

After the war and artistic success in Paris, he arrived in New York in 1936. Kertesz intended to stay briefly, but financial difficulties and then World War II made it impossible to return to France.

So he remained in New York and took pictures‚ wonderful off-center images with a modernist sensibility of the urban landscape and the people inhabiting it through the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

“For nearly twenty years his gifts remained relatively unrecognized in New York,” states PBS.org. Only in 1964, when a one-man show was held at the Museum of Modern Art, did he get the notice his work deserved.

“Very few artists are able to witness the formation of their own artistic medium. Kertesz was not only able to witness much of the beginnings of hand-held photography, but had a profound effect on it.

“With subtle and whimsical artistry, he took full advantage of a medium not yet sure of its own potential, and for that, contemporary photography remains in his debt.”

[Photo at top left, 1944; top right, Third Avenue and 46th Street, 1936, bottom left, 1943; bottom, 1959 on Sixth Avenue]