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The Charles W Cushman Collection of the Indiana University Archives


558 DeKoven St, Chicago IL (ca.1949)




I bumped into this collection of 1,241 color slide photo's from Chicago via a similar collection of Charles W Cushman's intriguing period snapshots of New York, ca.1940-1960. His work was all meticulously documented shooting journals that were acquired along with his equipment and collection by the Indiana University Archives. In his journals Cushman gives dates and locations down to the cross streets, and in some instances even the house number has been included. However over the years entire streets have vanished from Chicago in the name of blight prevention or progress, we've gained highways and exuberant but lonely fields of parking but have sadly broken the the long straight line of history between Cushman's journals and our experience. But the photographs are still here, preserved in uneasy colors.

The photograph was taken in 1949 it's subject was likely 558 DeKoven St, the building on the left. The backyard of this obsequious paint caked place happened to be where the great Chicago fire of 1871 began, it's where all of the crocodiles got out of their box and the poker game got real. That block and much of the area around it was completely razed in the 60's. Big boxes were made from smaller boxes until the pay phones got replaced by atm's and the gas stations would be replaced by different gas stations.
 
In his archive Cushman captures exceptionally rich images of Maxwell Street and it's old market culture. There's rag pickers face down in refrigerator sized boxes of under wear, doors disguised as shacks and all of the broken stuff one might expect among a shambling mound of crusty brick and sausage grease. Some of this has metaphorically been transitioned to where the great fire began at 558 DeKoven St. Now on Sundays between 8am and 4pm, weekly.

Cushman wasn't like Ansel Adams, or Robert Frank, by every account he was an amateur rather than an auteur. Still, his dedication shooting in neighborhoods like Bronzeville or at Maxwell St resulted in a richly textured collection that marks the wide breadth between Chicago's intentions and it's failures in a truly remarkable way. We need reminders of the crumbling structures and the reality of solidarity that those lost communities can no longer impart. It seems cruel to ignore what so obviously is an evocative celebration of that which backs might bear but arms can't hold than our eye's should not miss. Particularly when our arms are full, and our backs feel bent to the point of break. Why any curator at any Chicago institution hasn't secured even the most meager of elements of the Cushman Collection for an exhibition here seems criminal.

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