Eric Sandweiss – författare

Charles Cushman (1896-1972) photographed a disappearing world in living color. Cushman's midcentury America--a place normally seen only through a scrim of gray--reveals itself as a place as vivid and real as the view through our window.The Day in Its Color introduces readers to Cushman's extraordinary work, a recently unearthed archive of photographs that is the largest known body of early color photographs by a single photographer, 14,500 in all, most shot on vivid, color-saturated Kodachrome stock. From 1938-1969, Cushman--a sometime businessman and amateur photographer with an uncanny eye for everyday detail--travelled constantly, shooting everything he encountered as he ventured from New York to New Orleans, Chicago to San Francisco, and everywhere in between. His photos include portraits, ethnographic studies, agricultural and industrial landscapes, movie sets and media events, children playing, laborers working, and thousands of street scenes, all precisely documented in time and place. The result is a chronicle of an era almost never seen, or even envisioned, in color. This well-preserved collection is all the more remarkable for having gone undiscovered for decades. What makes the photos most valuable, however, is the wide range of subjects, landscapes, and moods it captures--snapshots of a lost America as yet untouched by a homogenizing overlay of interstate highways, urban renewal, chain stores, and suburban development--a world of hand-painted signs, state fairs, ramshackle shops, small town living and bustling urban scenes. The book also reveals the fascinating and startling life story of the man who stood, unseen, on the other side of the lens, surely one of America's most impressive amateur photographers and outsider artists. With over 150 gorgeous color prints, The Day in Its Color gives us one of the most evocative visual histories of mid-20th century America that we have.

St. Louis's story stands for the story of all those cities whose ambitions and civic self-image, forged from the growth of the mercantile and industrial eras, have been dramatically altered over time. More dramatically, perhaps, than most -- but in a manner shared by all -- St. Louis's changing economic base, shifting population and altered landscape have forced scholars, policymakers, and residents alike to acknowledge the transciency of what once seemed inexorable metropolitan trends: concentration, growth, accumulated wealth, and generally improved well-being. In this book, Eric Sandweiss scrutinizes the everyday landscape -- streets, houses, neighborhoods, and public buildings -- as it evolved in a classic American city. Bringing to life the spaces that most of us pass without noticing, he reveals how the processes of dividing, trading, improving, and dwelling upon land are acts that reflect and shape social relations. From its origins as a French colonial settlement in the eighteenth century to the present day, St.Louis offers a story not just about how our past is diagrammed in brick and asphalt, but also about the American city's continuing viability as a place where the balance of individual rights and collective responsibilities can be debated, demonstrated and adjusted for generations to come.