16 Works: Selected Images 1967-2000 , Printed 2000-2001

Teju Cole’s “The Image of Time” focuses on William Christenberry (1936-2016) who was a prominent photographer known for his series photographs. He primarily focused on landscape photography that interested him from his hometown, Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He was drawn to the Southern American aesthetic of shacks, simple churches, barns and makeshift building, as well as the red dust and wild vegetation of the region. Christenberry was self-appointed as historian of many sites in Hale County. This was not because of the great importance of the sites, but because they “called out to him and elicited from him a sense of responsibility”.

In a typical photographic series, there are usually different subjects depicted. However, in Christenberry’s photographic series, what is different is not the subject, but the time in which the photographs were taken. These photographs employed time as a narrative. Christenberry believed that time was photography’s illusion and expressed this through his series. Although an audience may be able to tell that photographs within his series were not taken at relatively close times, they are unable to tell exactly how long the length of time was between the photographs. Christenberry’s work seems to effortlessly pin down the central concern of human life: the passage of time.

Source:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/magazine/the-image-of-time.html