Artist Bill Christenberry, 1936-2016

Sometimes it’s remarkable how people’s lives and work can be defined from the ether.

In the wake of the death of William A. Christenberry — who taught at the Corcoran College of Art and lived in Washington — a constant theme ran through the headlines on his passing: “William Christenberry’s Haunted South,” “Photographer Who Found his Muse in Rural Alabama,” “Photographer of the Rural South,” “Artist of a Memory-Haunted South.”

It’s true enough, this emphasis on his subject matter, and the description in some ways speaks to generations of Southern artists, writers, poets, playwrights, novelists, painters, sculptors and photographers, be they from Alabama, as Christenberry was, or Mississippi or Georgia or the Carolinas or Louisiana.

It’s artists, really, black and white, who — obliquely, metaphorically, or directly — have confronted the South’s ghosts and deeply conflicted history, in a way that the ghosts of the South become avatars and muses and signposts to the past.

Christenberry — whose own inspiration came at least partly from photographer Walker Evans’s deservedly famous book with writer James Agee, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” about the lives of the poor in Depression-era Appalachia — had his own confrontations with the South’s past, which resulted in work referencing the Klan (he had encountered a Klan rally in the Tuscaloosa courthouse in 1960). But the works on which his international reputation was largely based — he was also an exceptionally interesting painter and sculptor — were his photographs of rural Alabama, specifically Hale County, although he was born in Tuscaloosa and educated at the University of Alabama.

His photographs were not “peopled.” They were mostly devoid of portraiture or even the presence of people. But if you look at them closely, they are all about residue, ghosts, what was left behind, the imprints and shadows of presence. And they are also about decay, the kind of stuff that gets in your dreams.

Famously, his life and career came together in a spectacularly fine exhibition, “Passing Time: The Art of William Christenberry,” mounted by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2006. In the accompanying catalog, you can see a wide range of his photographs, the early ones shot with a Brownie. They are shots of landscapes, buildings, fields, streets and signs that have faded and gone to seed. They are also, in their own way, scenes that escape the boundaries of the state itself.

And they seem to be full of sounds: wind rustling leaves, the yawning, squeaking sounds of old wood with loose nails. If peeling paint came make a sound like a sigh, it’s in these photographs, taken mostly in Hale County.

That place, that stretch of land, became Christenberry’s stage, his music, his book. You can find aspects of that in other artists: today, in Bill Dunlap’s Southern dogs and landscapes, and in the novels, surely, of that most Southern and beguiling and puzzling writer William Faulkner, as well as those of William Styron and Carson McCullers.

The photographs often seem like big books from which the pages have been torn, curtly described with no frills in “Black House, Red Roses and Rooster, Hinds County, Mississippi” (an apparent homage to the wide-traveling photographer William Eggleston, a Christenberry chum); white horses and black buildings from Newbern, Alabama; houses stubbornly on their last legs with signs still attached, like “Coca-Cola” and “Pepsi please” on “Taylor’s Place, near Greensboro, Alabama,” a house that finally surrendered to gravity, drowning in rust and empty windows in a field of green.

Take a long look for a moment at the 1976 photograph “T.B. Hick’s Store, Newborn, Alabama.” If there were time, you could measure its life expectancy, the thin pillars of wood holding up a roof, the time-caused tilt of a shed, the lines between the lines of roofing and tiling, the chair on a thin porch.

The photographs are a kind of literary record; you can make a story out of the slight tilt of the hat worn by a man at a sidewalk fruit stand in Memphis, flanked by a huge yellow “Loans” sign.

The Klan dolls and images are in the catalog too, images on the order of voodoo dolls and nightmares honestly stored in memory books.

Time does its things in Christenberry’s images. In the photographs, you can also see — even as decay does its work — the resistance to time, the insistence on the presence of the past.

Christenberry, who went by Bill to his colleagues and his many devoted students, died Nov. 28 in Washington at the age of 80 from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.