William A. Christenberry, whose widely admired color photographs of the red-clay landscapes and kudzu-wreathed dwellings in his native corner of the rural South describe the slow passage of time there with plain-spoken eloquence, died on Monday in Washington. He was 80.

Peter MacGill, his longtime New York gallerist, confirmed the death. The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease.

Few American artists have been so identified with one small patch of terrain as Mr. Christenberry was with Hale County, Ala. One of the poorest counties in the state, it was also photographed indelibly by Walker Evans during the Depression. But where Evans made his famous portraits of the Burroughs family as an empathetic visitor from New York, Mr. Christenberry observed the Deep South as a native son, its landscape signifying his ancestral home.

“Everything I want to say through my work comes out of my feelings about that place — its positive and its negative aspects,” he said in an interview in 2005.