CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/23/2014

Mostly Sunny, With a Sense of Menace: William Christenberry

In the February 21 New York Times, "Paper Gallery" editor Dana Jennings writes, "We do obsess about the weather. We gab and gossip about it, inhale it via the Weather Channel, brood on it out the kitchen window over morning coffee. The old radio farm reports had it right: Give 'em the weather and the wheat prices, and you got 'em hooked. In much the same way that we can't resist the external weather, the very best artists summon interior weathers that mesmerize us, psychic precip and visceral barometric pressures that move us. Think about Bob Dylan's cryptic winds and Johnny Cash's dark thunder, Emily Dickinson's attic squalls and Billy Collins's amused zephyrs, van Gogh's anguished gusts and Pollock's furious typhoons." Featured image, "CAT. 304" (1988), is reproduced from William Christenberry.. "Alabama pulses deep within the artistic DNA of the photographer William Christenberry, born in Tuscaloosa in 1936," Jennings writes. "And these photographs, most taken in Alabama in the 1960s and '70s, tell tales of an older, vanished South from inside that South. Most of Mr. Christenberry's images here fasten on the ramshackle and unpopulated: abandoned shacks, rusted signs, graveyards, kudzu on the move. 'I was always attracted by the warped shapes of rustic, smaller buildings and houses,' he writes, 'the way they had been molded, altered by time.'"