William Christenberry was born in Hale County, Alabama in 1936, the same year Walker Evans began photographing the Depression-era South for the Farm Service Administration. The result of Evans' travels, with the writer James Agee, was Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This collection of images of the impoverished South not only defined what Evans called his "documentary style;" it also defined landscape photography for many of the next generation of photographers.

Christenberry, who trained as a painter, came across the book when it was reissued in 1960. Impressed by the spareness of the text and the plainness of the photographs, he began traveling around the region, photographing some of the same churches, shacks, graveyards, and signs with a Kodak Brownie camera.

In 1961 he went to New York City to look for work. He heard that Walker Evans was at Fortune magazine, and arranged for a meeting. Evans took to the young man, and impressed by his connection to the southern landscape, urged him to continue.

Christenberry's original intention in covering the same territory was to document his findings through snapshots that he would later use as reference for paintings and sculptures. But as his "sketches" accrued, he became fascinated with the photographic process itself. Pinned up on the wall in groups, the small, nearly square prints from his Brownie began to suggest a serial approach to image-making. Although he started out in the shadow of Walker Evans, Christenberry's multiple views of a single subject created a new way of expressing the passage of time and the power of memory.

Obsessive attention to the telling details of humble structures, such as a windowless shack covered entirely in faux brick tarpaper, became the central theme of his photography. Even after Christenberry moved to Washington, D.C. in 1968, he made annual trips to Hale County and the surrounding areas. The same buildings photographed from one year to the next began to show a personal history, aging and decaying as the damp Southern climate gnawed away at their flimsy struts and siding. Paying attention to places built for and by the poor, documenting the changes brought by use and the weather while elsewhere, developers rush to transform humble villages into Disney-esque destinations, becomes a perceived political statement that neatly trumps nostalgia.

One of a generation of artists who use the camera as part of an arsenal of expressive media that, for him also includes sculpture, printmaking, drawing and installation, Christenberry's work is now collected in a sumptuous Aperture book, with essays by Walter Hopps, Andy Grundberg, and Howard N. Fox.

The closing words of Grundberg's essay give dimension to Christenberry's artistic practice: "[His] example tells us that we no longer need-if indeed we ever did-to label someone as a photographer or a painter, a sculptor or a printmaker, a builder of objects or a Conceptual artist. Like the other important artists of his generation, he has taken the discussion of art away from the means of its making and focused it instead on the making of its meanings. In the process, he has helped erase any remaining prejudice against photography within contemporary art."

Photo: Red Building in Forest, Hale County Alabama, 1983, ©2006 William Christenberry. Courtesy Aperture Foundation.

This week, William Christenberry talks about his poetic documentation of the vernacular landscape of the American South through his photographs, drawings, sculptures, and paintings in a series of talks organized by Aperture West (free admission.)

Thursday, November 30, 2006, 7:0
0 p.m.
Los Angeles, California
Hammer Museum, Gallery Six

Friday, December 01, 2006, 7:30 p.m.
San Francisco, California
PhotoAlliance at the San Francisco Art Institute

Saturday, December 02, 2006, 2:00 p.m.
Seattle, Washington
Henry Art Gallery

Christenberry's work is presented in a major retrospective at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Passing Time: The Art of William Christenberry, which continues at the American Art Museum through July 7, 2007.

William Christenberry Photographs, 1961-2005, a exhibit organized by Aperture Foundation, continues at the Birmingham Museum of Art through December 24, 2006.
The exhibition will then travel to the Mobile Museum of Art, opening on January