WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY

Following a 1961 meeting with Walker Evans, whose photographic portrait of Alabama sharecroppers during the Great Depression, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, deeply impacted Christenberry, he began to seriously pursue photography over his early explorations in abstract painting.

During annual pilgrimages to his native Hale County, Alabama, Christenberry recorded the changing appearance of the region’s natural landscape and vernacular architecture in diverse formats and media for nearly five decades. Recognised as a pioneer in colour photography, his images of rusted signage, winding dirt roads, and the weathered exteriors of humble structures present, with deceiving formal simplicity, prolonged studies of place that chronicle the passage of time in the rural South. Christenberry’s most frequent subjects, such as Coleman’s Cafe, Sprott Church, and the Palmist Building—often photographed straight-on and near the center of the frame—assume an iconic quality within his oeuvre as monuments of a disappearing past.