William Christenberry
foreword by Elizabeth Broun; essays by Walter Hopps, Andy Grundberg, and Howard N. Fox (Aperture, $40)

"For me, [William] Christenberry's art straddles the paradox of past and present. Rural Alabama still exists, like rural life throughout the South and Midwest and elsewhere, and his art is evidence of its sturdy and stubborn persistence. True, it has mostly vanished from the national consciousness and media, though it's occasionally trotted out to market the founders' values or a new wheat cracker…But a short trip through rural America's farm towns quickly displaces gentrified notions of quaintness with the realities of economic hard times and a resigned 'making do.' It can feel a lot like a journey into the past, but this is illusion. In fact, Christenberry's photographic series of individual buildings, gridded images tracing changes over time, are about an ever-the-same present, emphatically still here and now, even if the art world, and the rest of our world too, for that matter, has consigned it to the past. The currency of his art may be overshadowed by its elegiac qualities, but the present is deeply embedded in the practice of providing annual photographic updates of Alabama's material culture. These works are, paradoxically, about what is disappearing and what survives.

The artist's southern manners verge on courtliness--he still says 'ma'am' in a respectful drawl--so it's easy to miss the almost fierce toughness that lies just beneath the surface.…" --excerpted from the book's foreword by Elizabeth Broun, a director at Smithsonian American Art Museum