Influenced by photographers Walker Evans and William Eggleston, southern artist William Christenberry is considered a pioneer of color photography as a fine art medium. While working in a wide variety of media, he is best known for his exploration of the psychology of place, in particular, that of his home state of Alabama. Setting out to document the landscape of his forebearers as studies for future paintings, he unintentionally began a more comprehensive project. Through haunting imagery made from annual visits to the same decaying structures and forgotten landscapes in rural Alabama, he tells a larger story around the truths of time’s passage in the South. Intense, unfiltered and direct, these documents of Christenberry’s own reality serve as poignant reminders of life in a pre-digital age.
William Christenberry earned BFA and MFA degrees from the University of Alabama and later taught at Memphis State University and for many years at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D.C. He lived and worked in Washington, DC, for forty years. He was the recipient of several fellowships and grants as well as an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Alabama. His work was the subject of the exhibition “Passing Time: The Art of William Christenberry” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. He is included in many important public and private collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass.; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the George Eastman House, Rochester; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Menil Collection, Houston; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Six monographs of his work have been published over the last few decades.
