“The place makes you who you are, creates who you are,” photographer William Christenberry remarked in 1994.
For four decades, beginning in the early 1960s, Christenberry returned to the place that had made him. A poet with a camera, he famously captured what he called the “Southern landscape of beauty and wonderment, the side of it that is haunted with memory and sadness.” He cared deeply about his primary subjects — time, memory and place — and he dedicated his life’s work to exploring their hold on his imagination.
A new exhibition of more than 100 photographs drawn from the High Museum’s permanent collection, William Christenberry: Time and Texture, reveals just how profoundly the artist was marked by the buildings and landscapes of his native Hale County, Alabama, an area known as the Black Belt for its once rich, dark soil.
