William Christenberry

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.

Although best known for his large-format color photographs made with vintage Kodak Brownie cameras, William Christenberry has also consistently produced work with 35 mm Kodachrome slide film since he took up photography. William Christenberry: Kodachromes is the first publication to showcase this stunning and previously unknown body of work, spanning from 1964 to 2007, of which only a small number of images have ever been published or exhibited. As in all of Christenberry's photographs, the subject matter is the rural Deep South: the twisting back roads, open landscapes, rusted signage and ramshackle vernacular architecture found in Hale County, Alabama. Though many of the sites pictured in this rare collection are new, other subjects have grown iconic in Christenberry's oeuvre as he has returned to photograph them over the decades--the red building in the forest, Sprott Church, the Palmist Sign and the Bar-B-Q Inn, among others. The photographs in William Christenberry: Kodachromes were made with a camera that allowed for greater mobility, revealing new ways of considering Christenberry's perennial subjects and offering further insight into the working method of this venerable artist.
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 dozens of solo shows and 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, both in New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and 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.

Working from Memory is a collection of stories by the renowned photographer, painter and sculptor William Christenberry. Based on conversations with author and critic Susanne Lange, these stories elaborate the artist's memories of the Deep South, in whose rich literary tradition they are steeped. In a lyrical but lucid prose, they set personal experience against the backdrop of important political and cultural moments in the southern states, endowing that landscape with a vividness that will be familiar to fans of the artist's photography. Christenberry's own photographs accompany these tales.
Born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1936, William Christenberry grew up in the Deep South, where old road signs, deteriorating buildings and dirt roads shaped his boyhood memories. During his early career, Christenberry was primarily a painter, but he soon began to incorporate the use of a Brownie camera into his practice. In 1961 he moved to New York and met Walker Evans, the celebrated photographer of the Farm Security Administration, who had documented the devastating effect of the Great Depression in the South. Evans' photographs--many from Christenberry's home area--particularly influenced Christenberry's work as an artist. In 1968 he moved to Washington, D.C., and joined the faculty of the Corcoran School of Art and Design, where he continues to work as a professor of drawing and painting. Today, Christenberry's international stature continues to grow as his work is featured in many museums throughout the United States and abroad.

Since the early 1960s, William Christenberry has plumbed the regional identity of the American South through his work in Hale County, Alabama, where he was raised. Although he is most often associated with--and recognized as a pioneer in--American color photography, he also works in an unorthodox mix of media that includes sculpture, drawing, painting and found-object assemblage. This comprehensive survey of his work considers all those practices together, and in doing so gives readers access to the full scope and complexity of his vision. In every medium, Christenberry's theme is unified: the history, the story of place, is at the heart of his project. His poetic documentation of vernacular architecture, signage and landscape captures moments of quiet beauty in a sometimes mythic terrain that, with its worn iconography and buildings turned ramshackle, evokes the form and power of the passage of time. Since relocating to Washington, D.C., in 1968, Christenberry has dutifully returned to photograph the same locations annually--the green barn, the palmist building, the Bar-B-Q Inn--fulfilling a personal ritual and documenting the physical changes wrought by the passing of a year. More than half the photographs in this comprehensive survey are previously unpublished, including new and vintage images and a stunning selection of never-before-seen Kodachrome work. An essay by Walter Hopps, the artist's lifelong friend and the founding director of the Menil Collection, who passed away in 2005, will draw attention as well.

If Alabama-born artist William Christenberry regularly engages with the countryside of his home state, with the artlessness of the rural idyll, and the local architecture and its relationship to space, his multimedia installation, the so-called "Klan Room," takes this discourse one step further, deeper, and darker. The room, a continuously evolving work-in-progress consisting of a mass of sketches, paintings, sculptures, found objects, and photographs, addresses the subject of violent repression and racist persecution in the United States, and reveals Christenberry's critical reflection on myths and power symbols. Disappearing Places focuses as well on the artist's greater body of work, on his individual photographs, paintings, sculptures, and drawings, as well as his assemblages and material collages, which underline the poetic power of everyday found objects.