Door of Country Store, Pickensville, Alabama

This image of a shuttered country store entrance is animated by the patterns of the wooden framing, the layers of peeling paint, and the remaining pieces of signage. As William Christenberry wrote, “I was always attracted by the warped shapes of the rustic, smaller buildings and houses—the way they have been molded, altered by time.” His pictures from the 1970s, such as this, were taken with a small, inexpensive camera, yet they convey his concentrated attention and intuitive sense for handling color. The straightforward nature of his images aligned with the earlier work of Walker Evans, whose Depression-era images from Hale County, Alabama, helped inspire him.