William Christenberry - Visual Poet

William Christenberry, "Tool Shed - near Stewart, Alabama" (1977)

I want to pay tribute to one of my favorite photographers, William Christenberry, who died November 28, 2016. He was, for me, one of the best photographers of old shacks, sheds, barns, and other ephemeral places. He worked mostly in the documentary tradition of Walker Evans. Richard B. Woodward, in his “Country Roads” (The New York Times Sunday Book Review, September 3, 2006), says that Christenberry “moved in and out of the Evans penumbra all his life.” A brief “Goings On About Town” note in the January 9^th New Yorker calls him “a visual poet of the American south.” The note, a capsule review of a Christenberry exhibition at Pace/MacGill gallery, goes on to say,

The attention that Christenberry paid to his subjects, which he often photographed years apart, bordered on the devotional. Here, his deceptively modest images are poignant monuments to the passage—and the ravages—of time.

That last line neatly expresses one reason I’m drawn to Christenberry’s photos. Another reason is his feeling for a range of rich, corroded, distressed textures – thick rust, weather-beaten boards, eroded brick. Christenberry’s pictures show the texture of time.