While the post-war American Dream was being broadcast as Kodak moments through monster-scale Coloramas in Grand Central Terminal, starting in the 1950s, the young William Christenberry was exploring what he knew best, using a little Brownie Box camera. As an artist making paintings and sculptures, he often took snapshots to record the subjects of his concern: tenant farmer shacks; rural churches; graves; roadside stands with fading hand-lettered signs that dotted the landscape of his childhood home in Hale County, Alabama.

Christenberry came to New York in 1961 and met Walker Evans, who late in his career was the photo editor at Fortune magazine. According to the record, Evans took a shine to the young man and encouraged him to continue photographing the territory that he himself had previously put on the map in Let Us Know Praise Famous Men (1939), which he created in collaboration with author William Agee for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression.

Christenberry, who stayed only a year in New York, and in 1968 moved to Washington, D.C., returned to the rural south each year, often photographing the same places from the same point of view. He catalogued a variety of building types as they succumbed to decay and sometimes to self-destruction. Some were devoured by the fast-growing kudzu weed; some collapsed under their own weight; a few endured the ravages of time to become stately icons of a new type.

Left: White Building, Newbern, Alabama, 1973. Right: Red Building in Forest, Hale County, Alabama, 1974. Copyright William Christenberry, courtesy Aperture Foundation.

Although he began photographing with an old Brownie, Christenberry soon branched out, adding 35mm cameras and later a large format view camera to his kit. His work saw publication with William Christenberry: Southern Photographs (Aperture 1983) and has since been extensively exhibited, most recently in a show that is currently on view at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, accompanied by the catalogue, William Christenberry, (Aperture, 2006).

This week, William Christenberry: Kodachromes (Aperture 2010) is being introduced at a book signing with the photographer on Friday evening at Aperture Gallery. While a number of the images here have been previously published, the book presents the work on its own, organized chronologically, starting in the 1960s. The result of this approach is a collection that stands apart from his photographs in other formats, and apart from the drawings, paintings, and sculptures that Christenberry is also known for.

Something that becomes quickly apparent is that the 35mm format's 2:3 proportion provides more horizontal space in which to record landscape details than the square 127 Brownie format or the 4:5 proportion of the view camera. While in other formats, Christenberry often faces down his subjects at close range, in the Kodachromes, he often includes brooding storm clouds above, or scrubby, untended fields edged with unremarkable trees.

For example, Church, Near Sprott, Alabama, is first seen straight on, adjacent to a borderless dirt road, and later on from nearly the same vantage point in New and Old Churches, Near Sprott, Alabama. This is one of the few photographs in the collection that suggests any degree of prosperity. On the other hand, in many photographs of decayed buildings, often there are neither utility poles or power lines in view - and when they are there, they appear to bypass buildings that must have have gotten by without electricity. The iconic Red Building in the Forest is seen here five times between 1974 and 2007 - both in close up front views and from the side. With the chronological arrangement of the book, a subtle and effective sense of the passage of time emerges in this and other sites that Christenberry has frequently revisited.

This beautifully produced book, with a debossed jacket and tipped in print has endpages printed three sides that suggest a light table swarming with slides, each one stamped "Christenberry" and hand lettered with index information. An essay by Richard B. Woodward situates the photographer amid the changing perception of his work and among his contemporaries.

On Friday, December 10^th Aperture Gallery and Bookstore presents a book launch and signing for William Christianberry: Kodachromes from 6:00-8:00 pm. RSVP.  Aperture Foundation, 547 West 27th, 4th floor, NY, NY.

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