“The Day in Its Color”: Charles and Jean Cushman

In the years that followed, his work at the Business Bulletin added to his understanding of the inner workings of the American economy, and it further developed the "eye" that, in the coming decades, would make his photography of the American landscape distinctive.3 To read the Business Bulletin of the 1 920s is to see the fulfillment-through economies of scale, improved communications, and mechanical innovation-of the promise of the economic culture pioneered by families such as the Cushmans, in places such as southern Indiana, one hundred years earlier.\n18 Freed from the obscurity of the archives, Cushman's collection reveals a picture of midcentury America that is quite different from others we have inherited in the historical record. Viewed through pictures that are stripped of Newhall's "classic" scrim of black and white, the persistence of that landscape seemed less a signifier of crisis, as many documentarians had portrayed it, than a reminder of the continued, tangible immediacy of the aging world that our business leaders, architects, and policy makers told us we had left behind.