Text by François L. Cadava, William Christenberry, Carlos Martin, Justo Navarro, Yolanda Romero.
"Modesty and discretion characterize everything Christenberry touches.” –Richard B. Woodward, The New York Times
William Christenberry is firmly established as a contemporary American master photographer, but no comprehensive overview of his diverse talents is currently in print. This 260-page volume--the largest Christenberry overview yet published--corrects this lacuna, offering a thematic survey of his half-century-long career. It is composed of 13 sections, each devoted to a particular series or theme: the wooden sculptures of Southern houses, cafes and shops; the early, black-and-white, Walker Evans-influenced photographs of Southern interiors, taken in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 60s; documentations of Ku Klux Klan meeting houses and rallies, from the mid-1960s; color photographs of tenant houses in Alabama, from 1961 to 1978; signs in landscapes, ranging from handwritten gas station signs to Klan and corporate signs; graves (which, through Christenberry's lens, emerge as a kind of folk art); churches in Alabama, Delaware and Mississippi, taken between the mid-1960s and the 80s; Alabama street scenes, in towns such as Demopolis, Marion and Greensboro; street scenes in Tennessee (mostly Memphis); Southern landscapes; gas stations, trucks and cars in Alabama; and a selection from Christenberry's famous series of buildings to which he returns annually, photographing them over several decades-the palmist building, the Underground Nite Club, Coleman's Cafe, the Bar-B-Q Inn, the Green Warehouse and the Christenberry family home, near Stewart, Alabama.
William Christenberry (born 1936) has been a professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, D.C., since 1968. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions over the last 40 years, and can be found in numerous permanent collections, including those of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson. His work was the subject of a major year-long solo exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2006.
Featured image is reproduced from William Christenberry.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
WSJ Magazine
Molly Young
The 260-page volume is divided into 13 sections - each dedicated to a recurring theme in Christenberry's works - and covers the range of his career, from early black-and-white photos of interiors clearly influenced by Christenberry's original hero, Evans, to the buildings he returns to annually, including the Bar-B-Q Inn and his grandparents' home in Alabama.
The New York Times
Dana Jennings
Alabama pulses deep within the artistic DNA of the photographer William Christenberry, born in Tuscaloosa in 1936. And these photographs, most taken in Alabama in the 1960s and '70s, tell takes of an older, vanished South from inside that South.
CHOICE
R.T. Clement
Following in the footsteps and traditions of Walker Evans, James Agee, and William Faulkner, since the 1960s Christenberry (b. 1936) has vividly documented the disappearing rural landscape of the American South, particularly scenes from his youth in Hale County, AL. This evocative catalogue to a Spanish exhibition of 300 photographs and a dozen sculptures aims to widen his exposure in Europe. Christenberry's quietly evocative images capture and recapture (he often photographs the same buildings and locales year after year) the decline, deterioration, and transformation of abandoned tenant-farmer houses and other buildings, country churches and cemeteries, and dilapidated advertising signs. Included in the show is The Klan Room (1962-97), an installation of signage, photos, and artifacts that have haunted him since he briefly attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting in 1960. Atypical urban landscapes of Beale Street, Memphis, round out the exhibition. Essays introduce and comment on his life, motifs, and documentary style. Other noteworthy, recent additions to the photographer's critical canon include William Christenberry, by A. Grundberg et al., written to accompany the Smithsonian exhibition Passing Time (2006); and the monographs William Christenberry: Working from Memory: Collected Stories, compiled and edited by S. Lange (2008), and Christenberry's Kodachromes (2010). Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers.
STATUS: Out of stock
Temporarily out of stock pending additional inventory.
"I'll never forget what Walker Evans said about my Brownie photographs. He encouraged me to continue making pictures and to take them seriously, that there was something very special about them. He said, 'You have a way of … you know where to stand with that little camera, exactly where to stand to use it to its best advantage...' He said, 'I don't find it too unusual coming out of your painting background. You have a real sensitivity to color.'" –William Christenberry (November 5, 1936 - November 28, 2016) continue to blog
In the February 21 New York Times, "Paper Gallery" editor Dana Jennings writes, "We do obsess about the weather. We gab and gossip about it, inhale it via the Weather Channel, brood on it out the kitchen window over morning coffee. The old radio farm reports had it right: Give 'em the weather and the wheat prices, and you got 'em hooked. In much the same way that we can't resist the external weather, the very best artists summon interior weathers that mesmerize us, psychic precip and visceral barometric pressures that move us. Think about Bob Dylan's cryptic winds and Johnny Cash's dark thunder, Emily Dickinson's attic squalls and Billy Collins's amused zephyrs, van Gogh's anguished gusts and Pollock's furious typhoons." Featured image, "CAT. 304" (1988), is reproduced from William Christenberry.. "Alabama pulses deep within the artistic DNA of the photographer William Christenberry, born in Tuscaloosa in 1936," Jennings writes. "And these photographs, most taken in Alabama in the 1960s and '70s, tell tales of an older, vanished South from inside that South. Most of Mr. Christenberry's images here fasten on the ramshackle and unpopulated: abandoned shacks, rusted signs, graveyards, kudzu on the move. 'I was always attracted by the warped shapes of rustic, smaller buildings and houses,' he writes, 'the way they had been molded, altered by time.'" continue to blog
Join us Saturday, December 14 from 12:30 - 6:00 pm at the Aperture Holiday Book Bazaar, where we will feature signed books by William Christenberry, alongside favorite titles like Anders Petersen & JH Engström: From Back Home, Enrico Natali: Detroit 1968, Jason Fulford: Hotel Oracle, Linder: Woman / Object, Taryn Simon: Birds of the West Indies, Tierney Gearon: Alphabet Book and Top Secret: Images from the Stasi Archives, among others. PLUS: free tote bag with purchase!
continue to blog
Published by TF Editores/Fundación Mapfre/D.A.P.. Text by François L. Cadava, William Christenberry, Carlos Martin, Justo Navarro, Yolanda Romero.
"Modesty and discretion characterize everything Christenberry touches.” –Richard B. Woodward, The New York Times
William Christenberry is firmly established as a contemporary American master photographer, but no comprehensive overview of his diverse talents is currently in print. This 260-page volume--the largest Christenberry overview yet published--corrects this lacuna, offering a thematic survey of his half-century-long career. It is composed of 13 sections, each devoted to a particular series or theme: the wooden sculptures of Southern houses, cafes and shops; the early, black-and-white, Walker Evans-influenced photographs of Southern interiors, taken in Alabama and Mississippi in the early 60s; documentations of Ku Klux Klan meeting houses and rallies, from the mid-1960s; color photographs of tenant houses in Alabama, from 1961 to 1978; signs in landscapes, ranging from handwritten gas station signs to Klan and corporate signs; graves (which, through Christenberry's lens, emerge as a kind of folk art); churches in Alabama, Delaware and Mississippi, taken between the mid-1960s and the 80s; Alabama street scenes, in towns such as Demopolis, Marion and Greensboro; street scenes in Tennessee (mostly Memphis); Southern landscapes; gas stations, trucks and cars in Alabama; and a selection from Christenberry's famous series of buildings to which he returns annually, photographing them over several decades-the palmist building, the Underground Nite Club, Coleman's Cafe, the Bar-B-Q Inn, the Green Warehouse and the Christenberry family home, near Stewart, Alabama.
William Christenberry (born 1936) has been a professor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, Washington, D.C., since 1968. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions over the last 40 years, and can be found in numerous permanent collections, including those of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Center for Creative Photography, Tucson. His work was the subject of a major year-long solo exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2006.
