William Christenberry

Evans, Agee, and Hale County

Christenberry grew up in Alabama and studied painting at university. A turning point came through James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: he recognized the sharecropper families Evans had photographed in 1936 as people he had known during childhood.^*1 Evans’s frontal photographs record buildings and people with pronounced clarity, while Agee’s long, subjective prose describes poverty in the same region through an ethical and literary voice. Christenberry later said that Agee’s writing influenced him even more than Evans’s photographs, and he made his own memories and feelings part of the work.^*3 His Hale County project begins as a repeated return by someone from the region to a homeland that Evans had already placed within photographic history.

Brownie Color Photographs

When Christenberry returned to Hale County, he made small color photographs with a Kodak Brownie, though he did not initially think of himself as a photographer. In a later interview, he recalled showing the Brownie pictures to Walker Evans, who told him that “this little camera has become an extension of your eye” and urged him to take them seriously; Christenberry joked that his interest in photography at the time was “as close to zero as physics,” but that this exchange became a beginning.^*18 Smithsonian material likewise describes the photographs first serving as references for painting and sculpture before coming to be recognized as independent works.^*1 The sequence complicates any simple answer to why he “chose photography”: the choice emerged during the work itself. Repeated returns to home could be accumulated immediately in the small Brownie color image, and an outside observer’s recognition that these pictures possessed a vision different from his painting helped turn reference material into the work itself. At a moment when large black-and-white prints still carried considerable authority in fine-art photography, Christenberry kept the small color prints and developed them into long-term sequences. The High Museum has retrospectively described him as a pioneer of color photography.^*5 The Philadelphia Museum of Art stated in its 1991 exhibition that the Brownie pictures began as aids to landscape painting and as personal records, and that Evans, whom Christenberry met in 1961, encouraged him to treat them seriously as photographs.^*4 A 1983 oral history also records his early self-understanding as an artist continuing painting, sculpture, and photography in parallel.^*16

Serial Rephotography

The core of Christenberry’s method is repeated return: he continued photographing the same buildings over time. Coleman’s Cafe is held by the NGA as a sequence of sixteen views of the same establishment made between 1967 and 1996.^*6 The High Museum explains that once enough photographs accumulated, he arranged them as grids, allowing structural decay and the encroachment of nature to appear as continuous time.^*7 A single photograph can be admired for the beauty of an aging structure; in a sequence, the building must change and may eventually disappear. Pace’s presentation of Green Warehouse similarly treats twenty-one photographs made over more than thirty years as a single extended work and quotes Christenberry’s interest in finding the same subject different on each return.^*8 Through this method, the landscape moves from the appearance of a place to the process of a place being exposed to time.

Palmist Building

Palmist Building makes this method especially clear. According to the High Museum, Christenberry began photographing in 1961 a building that had been a relative’s store during his childhood and continued following it as surrounding trees grew and covered the structure.^*9 Pace records that when he returned in 1988 the building itself had vanished; the “site of the building” therefore entered the sequence.^*10 Continuing to photograph after the subject is gone changes the work from a record of architecture into a record of the loss of an object of memory. Smithsonian Magazine’s discussion of his repeated photographs of the Bar-B-Q Inn likewise links decades of revisits to his attachment to the building’s proportions and its local role.^*11 For Christenberry, repetition was also the bodily act of remaking a private homecoming each year, not an objective time-lapse system. He accepted the changes encountered on each return instead of mechanically fixing an identical viewpoint, so the sequence also contains the photographer’s own time. Photographing the empty site after the building disappeared makes the photograph evidence of when loss occurred as well as evidence that something once stood there.^*10

Photography, Models, and Red Soil

Christenberry remade photographed buildings as small architectural models and used red soil gathered in Hale County as material for their bases. The Smithsonian’s River House is described as a work connecting childhood memories of fishing to a model and actual Alabama soil.^*12 SAAM’s Passing Time brought photographs, drawings, paintings, sculpture, and architectural constructions together as a sustained study of place, showing that the movement among media was integral to the work.^*13 Signs were equally important. The High Museum notes his collection and photography of both corporate logos and hand-painted signage, locating them in the 1950s and 1960s moment when boundaries between fine art and popular visual culture were under pressure.^*5 Photography is one element in Christenberry’s larger archive, which translates buildings, lettering, soil, and memory across different forms.

Klan Room / Klan Tableau

Klan Room / Klan Tableau brings Christenberry’s attachment to the South into direct collision with the white supremacist violence embedded in the same region. In a 2010 Smithsonian oral history, he discusses secretly photographing a Klan gathering, making Klan figures, and the strong responses the installation provoked.^*3 The Smithsonian American Art Museum holds his 1963 KKK Doll as a work relating to African American history.^*14 Pace’s Desire Paths placed the Klan Tableau—comprising roughly 400 figures, photographs, illuminated crosses, Confederate flags, and other materials collected over more than forty years—beside work by RaMell Ross as a confrontation with white supremacist terror.^*8 The repeated photographs of buildings and soil accumulate attachment to place; the Klan works prevent that same landscape from cohering into innocent nostalgia. Memories of beauty and of terror are made to occupy the same Southern history.

Color as a Record of Time

When Christenberry began using color in his Brownie photographs in the early 1960s, large black-and-white prints remained a strong norm in fine-art photography. His small color prints predate Eggleston’s controversial 1976 MoMA exhibition and Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces.^*20 The importance of color in Christenberry’s work, however, is not exhausted by chronological precedence. Because he returns to the same buildings, white clapboard turning gray, the intensification of red soil and rust, and vegetation overtaking a structure register as differences through time. The High Museum treats his color photographs as part of long-term work following architecture and the temporal life of the land.^*5 Color records what has changed since the previous visit; visual vividness is secondary to that temporal function.

Christenberry, Eggleston, and Shore

The relation between Christenberry and William Eggleston is sometimes simplified into a story of influence within the history of color photography. In his 2010 Smithsonian oral history, Christenberry recalled that Eggleston, when they met, was deeply engaged with Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” and working in black and white; he also remembered Eggleston taking strong interest in his Brownie color photographs and beginning to use color around the same period.^*3 In the same interview, however, Christenberry declined to state a direct causal claim that his photographs led Eggleston to color.^*3 Their finished work also differs. Eggleston turned everyday objects, interiors, cars, and signs around Memphis into tightly colored individual images; Stephen Shore’s American Surfaces accumulated meals, motel rooms, roads, and televisions through travel.^*21 Christenberry increased neither distance nor number of locations. He returned to the same limited territory of Hale County and accumulated the transformation of the same structures over long periods. All three work in color, but the temporal unit differs: Eggleston’s single image, Shore’s movement, Christenberry’s return. In the New Topographics of the 1970s, Shore, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and others organized human-altered landscapes in deliberately neutral-looking descriptions.^*22 Christenberry worked with related vernacular architecture while retaining personal attachment and the repetition of homecoming. Aperture’s major 2006 retrospective presented him as a pioneer of color photography influenced by Evans and working in parallel with the Bechers, while bringing photography, sculpture, drawing, and collected objects into one body of work.^*2

Southern Nostalgia and Violence

Christenberry’s photographs of the South hold together affection for disappearing buildings and fear of white supremacist violence. The Encyclopedia of Alabama describes his annual returns as a record of vanishing ways of life and architecture, while the Klan Tableau uses hundreds of objects to address the KKK’s violence embedded in the same region.^*17 Pace Gallery’s 2023 Desire Paths paired Christenberry with RaMell Ross as two artists working in Hale County. Ross centers Black daily life and human figures; Christenberry’s landscapes were described as “conspicuously devoid of people.”^*8 Christenberry carried racial violence primarily through Klan objects and largely unpopulated landscapes, while Ross places Black bodies and everyday life at the center of the frame. Ross’s work re-describes Hale County from within Black life, making the choice of whom to include in the picture a shift in the historical center of gravity even when the place is the same. William Christenberry: Photographs, 1961–2005, organized by Aperture, traveled widely; at Reynolda House in 2010 he was presented with Eggleston and Shore as an innovator in modern color photography.^*19 The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 1991 exhibition assembled roughly fifty color photographs, making serial return central to a museum presentation before the method was more broadly reassessed.^*4 The National Gallery of Art now makes available a body of work that includes chromogenic prints as well as sculpture and prints such as Memory Form II, confirming at the level of the collection that Christenberry’s work cannot be confined to photography.^*15