William Christenberry: Kodachromes is the first publication to showcase the artist’s stunning and previously unknown body of work produced with 35 mm Kodachrome slide film.
Spanning from 1964 to 2007, only a small number of the images have ever been published or exhibited. As in all of Christenberry’s photographs, the subject matter is the rural Deep South: the twisting back roads, open landscapes, rusted signage, and ramshackle vernacular architecture found in Hale County, Alabama where the artist was born and raised. Though many of the sites pictured in this rare collection are new, other subjects grew iconic in Christenberry’s oeuvre as he has returned to photograph them for decades—the red building in the forest, Sprott Church, the Palmist Sign, and the Bar-B-Q Inn, among others. However, the photographs in William Christenberry: Kodachromes, made with a camera that allowed for greater mobility, reveal new ways of considering Christenberry’s perennial subjects and offer further insight into the working method of this venerable artist. With the recent discontinuation of Kodachrome film by Kodak, the work in this beautiful volume is rendered even more meaningful.
William Christenberry (born in Hale County, Alabama, 1936) has been a professor at the Corcoran College of Art + Design, Washington, D.C., since 1968. His work has been the subject of dozens of solo shows and exhibitions over the last forty years, and can be found in numerous permanent collections, including those of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona. His work was the subject of a major year-long solo exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2006.
Richard B. Woodward (essay) is an art critic based in New York who frequently writes about photography.
Hardcover with jacket
11 2/5″ x 9 2/5″
176 pages
115 four-color images
www.aperture.org
