WilliamChristenberry

William Andrew Christenberry Jr. (1936, Tuscaloosa, Alabama – 2016, Washington, D.C.) was an American photographer, painter, sculptor, and teacher whose work drew on his childhood in Hale County, Alabama. He received a Brownie camera as a joint Christmas gift with his sister in 1944, a camera he continued to use throughout his career even after adopting large-format view cameras. He earned a BFA (1958) and MFA (1959) in painting and sculpture from the University of Alabama, initially working in an Abstract Expressionist mode.

In 1961, while teaching in Tuscaloosa, Christenberry encountered James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which crystallized the direction his own photography of Hale County — begun in 1958 — was already taking. He moved briefly to New York and then to Memphis, where he befriended William Eggleston, before settling in Washington, D.C. in 1968 to teach at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, a position he held until 2009. He made annual pilgrimages to Hale County to photograph and document the slow decay of vernacular buildings, signs, and structures, a project that in 1973 briefly reunited him with Walker Evans on Evans's only return to the county since 1936.

Christenberry's work is a sustained meditation on place, memory, and the passage of time: on formal and conceptual levels it focuses on the prolonged study of individual structures, chronicling their evolving identity as both architectural fact and psychological terrain. From 1974 he began translating some of these photographed buildings into detailed sculptures set in soil gathered from their sites, and he is also remembered for the multi-medium 'Klan Room' construction addressing his brief, frightening encounter with the Ku Klux Klan.

His work is held in major permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the George Eastman House, Rochester; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Cologne. He was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in 2011 and died in Washington, D.C. in 2016.