An elegiac vision of time and place

Christenberry trains his insider's lens on rural South

An eye for the eccentric is seen in "Hubcaps, near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1993."

William Christenberry locates his photographs at the intersection of simplicity and profundity. His enduring concerns are the interplay between the eternal and ephemeral; the passage of time generally; and how that interplay and passage figure in the rural Alabama where he grew up and which he's photographed for nearly half a century. Christenberry is one of the great visual chroniclers of the South, very much an heir of Walker Evans and counterpart of his friend and fellow colorist William Eggleston.

There are a few black-and-white images in "William Christenberry Photographs, 1961-2005," the excellent retrospective that runs at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design's Bakalar Gallery through Dec. 6. They come from early in his career, when Christenberry - who also paints, sculpts, and draws - was using nothing more elaborate than a Kodak Brownie. The show also includes a mixed-media sculpture of Christenberry's, called "Memory." Its austere Minimalism echoes the minimalism of his photographs, something his use of color can obscure.

The lack of color in these early photographs underscores the impressive constancy of Christenberry's vision and approach. He was taking formal pictures of informal subjects right from the start. A delight in the elegance of frontality has never left him. "Christmas Star, near Akron, Alabama, 2000" is representative, as well as a marvel of innate restraint.

Even when Christenberry shifts the camera - with a resulting beautiful play of angles, steps, and entrances in "Guinea Church, near Moundville, Alabama, 1964" - the essential formality of his approach remains intact. The only thing that's changed over the years has been his means of pursuing that vision and approach. He shot most of the photographs in the show with either a 35mm or 8-inch by 10-inch view camera.

The lack of color also highlights the connection with Evans: a straightforward visual approach; a consistent, unemphatic respect for homely material; a delight in vernacular handiwork, signs especially. (There are three of them, not just pictures of them but actual signs, in the show.) One can almost feel Evans's ghost coveting Christenberry's "Pure Oil Sign in Landscape, near Marion, Alabama, 1977" or " 'Do You Believe in Jesus, I Do,' Stephen Sykes' Place, near Aberdeen, Mississippi, 1966."

Christenberry differs from Evans in two key respects. Color isn't necessarily one of them. Although we think of Evans as an exemplar of black-and-white documentary - gray is the color of truth, and Evans is its prophet - he did do some work with color film toward the end of his life. And it's easy to imagine a Chistenberry photograph like "5¢ Wall With Johnson Grass, Demopolis, Alabama, 1980" being shot by Evans 45 years earlier - certainly, the subject would have attracted him - when he was taking the pictures that would go into "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men."

No, the biggest difference is that Christenberry doesn't work as an outsider. Evans was ever and always an outsider - something as true when he was in Havana or on the New York subway as when in Alabama. Christenberry is plainly at home here. His vision is every bit as clear-eyed as Evans's, but far less stark. His landscape is lusher than Evans's, and it's not just the ubiquity of kudzu. Color is part of this, of course. Color breathes, whereas black and white is anaerobic. Another element is oddity. As native, rather than visitor, Christenberry's better able to cherish the eccentric and grotesque, if not take them for granted. How eccentric, how grotesque? Titles like "Grave With Egg Carton Cross, Hale County, Alabama, 1962" and "Hubcaps, near Tuscaloosa, Alabama, 1993" speak for themselves.

Egg cartons and hubcaps - graves, too - don't exist without people. Yet Christenberry presents an evacuated landscape. There are all of two people, one of them barely visible, in the 58 photographs here. This is the other great difference from Evans, whose Alabama is forever linked to the faces of the Gudger, Ricketts, and Woods families.

One of the most basic facts of human existence is that it occurs in time. So much of the appeal of photography is how it seems to deny that fact. We don't know how a person in a picture looked before or after, only right there and then. We do know how a building, say, is supposed to look. So the tumbledown structures Christenberry shows wonderfully convey - as people could not - his fascination with time's passage. So, too, more subtly, do the many churches and gravesites.

Again and again we see signs of wear and tear, as in "Fallen House, near Marion, Alabama, 1975" or two sequences of buildings collapsing over time: Coleman's Cafe and the Palmist Building (what a name!). Conversely, the very amusing "Kudzu Devouring Building, near Greensboro, Alabama, 2004" makes the same point using a very different form of encroachment.

Kudzu, lest we forget, is not native to the South. The region of the country that has always most prized the past and feared the future, it long ago gave itself up to a different kind of invasive growth: Sunbelt excess and boosterism. That is not Christenberry's South. No hum of air conditioning or NASCAR roar is audible in these pictures. Instead we hear the silence of the grave - or, even further back in time, that of "Indian Mounds, near Moundville, Alabama, 1999." A master elegist, Christenberry is for Alabama what Atget was for Paris. He arrests time's Crimson Tide.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.