“STRADDLING THE LINE BETWEEN INVENTION AND THE DOCUMENTATION OF A REAL PLACE”: OF TIME & PLACE, FEATURING THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF WALKER EVANS AND WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY

(PHOTOGRAPHY) EVANS, Walker and CHRISTENBERRY, William. Of Time & Place. San Francisco: The Friends of Photography, 1990. Quarto, original photographic stiff paper wrappers. $150.

First edition, issue in wrappers, of this comparison of Evans’ and Christenberry’s photographic studies of Hale County, Alabama, with 26 black-and-white photographs by both (including several of Evans’ iconic portraits) and 28 in color by Christenberry. From the collection of acclaimed photojournalist Peter Turnley, with his ownership signature.

“Walker Evans casts a lengthening shadow over contemporary photography. For well over half a century, what he called his ‘documentary style’—images so deadpan they seem not to exhibit any style at all—has shaped several generations of artists…William Christenberry has moved in and out of the Evans penumbra all his life. Born in the same year (1936) and in the same region (Hale County, Ala., and its environs) where Evans and James Agee initiated the project that became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Christenberry grew up among the same sorts of places and people—tiny wooden Baptist churches, roadhouse shacks, tenant farmers—that those two visitors from up north turned into icons of the impoverished rural South. His adoption and revision of Evans’ heritage makes Christenberry an unusual and valuable artist” (New York Times). Many of Christenberry’s photographs in this volume—“the fifty-first in a series of publications on serious photography by the Friends of Photography”—revisit the same locales photographed by Evans decades earlier, while others document Christenberry’s multiple trips to other locations years apart. Simultaneously issued in cloth. From the collection of Peter Turnley, acclaimed photojournalist for Newsweek, Life and Harper’s Magazine, who has covered “almost every important international news event of the last 15 years” (New York Times).

Spine slightly sunned. An about-fine copy.