“I’m Very Much in Love with Where I’m From”: William Christenberry’s American South

The photographer William Christenberry, who died last week, at the age of eighty, was often described as a chronicler of a decaying American South. It is true that in much of his work—shots of older buildings emptied of people, beams gap-toothed and nature ready to overtake—there is an attraction to what is passing, or what has passed. But Christenberry rejected the idea that his work was a lamentation or an elegy. “I feel that I’m very much in love with where I’m from,” he told the journal Southern Cultures, in 2011. “I find some old things more beautiful than the new, and I continue to seek those places out, and I go back to them every year until sooner or later they are gone.” Born in Tuscaloosa in 1936, Christenberry moved to New York City as a young man, but the place he returned to each year was Hale County, Alabama, where he had spent childhood summers on his grandparents’ farms. It was a region memorialized decades earlier by James Agee and Walker Evans in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” “What Agee was doing in the written word was what I wanted to do visually,” Christenberry once said.