Seealso:Documentary Photography; Photography
in Japan; Portraiture; Socialist Photography; War
Photography
Further Reading
Cameron, Nigel, ed.The Face of China, 1860–1912 As Seen
by Photographers & Travelers. Millerton, New York:
Aperature, 1978.
Capa, Cornell, ed.Behind the Great Wall of China: Photo-
graphs from 1870 to the Present. Greenwich, Connecticut
and New York: New York Graphic Society and Metro-
politan Museum of Art, 1972.
Tuyl, Gijs van, Annelie Lu ̈tgens, and Karen Smith.The Chi-
nese, Wolfsburg. Germany: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2004.
Wu Changyun, ed.1957–2000, An Anthology of Chinese
Photography. Beijing, 2003.
Wu Hung, ed.The First Guangzhou Triennial. Reinterpreta-
tion: A Decade of Experimental Chinese Art 1990–200.
Guangzhou, China: Gaungdong Museum of Art, 2002.
Wu Hung, ed.Between Past and Future. New Photography
and Video from Chin, New York: International Center of
Photography, 2004, and traveling.WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY
American
Among the most significant post-World War II
color photographers, William Christenberry came
upon photography nearly by accident. He began
his career as a painter, earning a fine arts degree in
1959 from the University of Alabama in Tusca-
loosa, where he was born and raised. At the urging
of his instructor, Mel Price, Christenberry traveled
to New York City in 1958, where he quickly
became enamored of the energetic, avant-garde
canvasses of the Abstract Expressionists, namely
painters Willem de Kooning and Arshile Gorky.
He was later drawn towards the iconic works of
Pop artists Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine, as well
as others who incorporated signage into their
work. These artists encouraged him to consider
the vernacular—the materials of everyday life—as
an appropriate subject for his art. He was increas-
ingly drawn to representation in his paintings; and
upon his move to Memphis, Tennessee for a teach-
ing position the following year, Christenberry
began using an old Kodak Brownie camera as a
tool to record the colors, shapes, and forms of his
native landscape. On a practical level, the camera’s
casual, instantaneous, 3 500 drugstore prints func-
tioned as preliminary sketches for paintings; but
they also served as a repository for memories of a
distant time and place that the artist would collect
and nurture over the years.
In 1960, a seminal moment occurred in which
Christenberry discovered the Depression-eraLet
Us Now Praise Famous Men(1941) with its text
by James Agee and photographs by Walker
Evans. Originally commissioned for publication in
Fortune magazine, the now-classic work, chro-
nicled the landscape and milieu that Christenberry
knew so well: Hale County, Alabama, the heart of
the South’s Black Belt region known for its cot-
ton and slave plantations. In 1936, coincidentally
the year of Christenberry’s birth, Fortune had
sent the two men in search of a story, and they
returned with an opus. Evans’s stark and yet
elegiac pictures of the sharecropper families he
came to know, their homes, and routines of
daily life have since been identified with a mod-
ern, documentary style of photography. By refus-
ing to sentimentalize his subjects, he instead
presented them with a quiet dignity. Christen-
berry was captivated by Evans’s images as well
as Agee’s text, which reminded him of another
inspiration, that of the Southern literature of
William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. Still shoot-
ing the Brownie images as studies for painted
works, it was not until Christenberry met Evans
in October 1961 that he decided to turn his atten-
tion to photography as an endpoint.
Evans, then an editor atFortune, helped Chris-
tenberry obtain a job as a picture file clerk at Time-
Life and remained a close friend until the elder
photographer’s death in 1975. Evans found the
young Christenberry’s Brownie prints to have a
purity of vision, breathtaking candor, and a poetic
quality unlike most color photography, which he
found ‘‘vulgar’’ (Southall 1990). Evans strongly
encouraged Christenberry to continue with photo-CHRISTENBERRY, WILLIAM