The Lost Idols of Hale County

William Christenberry's iconic photographs capture the mystically entropic landscapes of the American South

by

Many drives down many quiet roads are marked by nameless structures that barely whisper this largely insignificant truth: “Someone was here, sometime.” It is not a prerequisite that the structures are abandoned, though most are. But even where life still lives, the clapboard homes, corrugated iron, discarded bathtubs, dented trucks, and overgrown storefronts tend to sink into their landscapes, to disappear.

I’ve seen these faded icons of our region my entire life—littered on the outskirts and in the background of my own clean, controlled, upper-middle class upbringing. But when, especially during my childhood, the world stopped moving long enough for me to actually see them, they lent themselves to storytelling, to pretend, to uncovering something unwitnessed. Draped in memories others have forgotten, such places rang of the mysticism and unparalleled imagination that can only exist here, in the American South.

William Christenberry recognized something similar along the roads of storied Hale County, Alabama. His oeuvre stretches over forty years and the iconic photographs capturing Hale County’s vernacular architecture are just one facet of a remarkable body of work, which is the subject of a new retrospective at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Memory is a Strange Bell: The Art of William Christenberry includes Christenberry’s work in sculpture, painting, printmaking, and more, but it is his stark, remarkable photographs of churches, sheds, empty and doorless houses, and graveyards that have solidified Christenberry’s status as one of the most impactful artists of the 20th century American South.

Divided by era, the exhibition simultaneously marks time and the artist’s increased skill—intuitive from the beginning, then stoked by inspirations that the Ogden takes care to include too. Start in a room filled with tiny, mesmerizing dye transfers, taken on the first camera he ever owned, a Kodak Brownie, during the 1960s-70s. Still considered by many as some of his most compelling work, these images were merely to serve as models for Christenberry’s sketches and paintings. It wasn’t until Walker Evans—the famed photographer of James Agee’s classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and a personal mentor of Christenberry’s—noted the profundity of this self-taught photographer’s work that Christenberry began to consider photography on its own.

Throughout the 1970s, he worked closely with Evans to document and explore scenes of their shared muse—Hale County. The photographs, taken on a Polaroid SX70, are explored in the second section of the Ogden’s exhibition. This stage of Christenberry’s career marks his massive influence on the art of photography, including his pioneering use of color alongside his fellow photographer and friend William Eggleston

The third room completes Christenberry’s growth as a fine art photographer, documenting his work on the Deardorff 8”x10” large-format view camera, which he began to use at the encouragement of his fellow artist and friend Lee Friedlander and which became the tool he used until the end of his career. Revisiting many of the same subjects captured all those years ago by the Brownie, this collection resounds with the renewed gravitas of growth—Christenberry’s as an artist, the images’ literal expansions and intensity, and the landscape’s changes over time.

Time is paramount to the impact of Christenberry’s work. Though he never lived in Alabama again after departing for New York City in 1961, he returned to Hale County almost every single year—drawn to document the details of this rural corner of Alabama. He described this fixation in a 2005 interview with photographer and writer Robert Hirsch for The Afterimage Magazine, saying, “This is and always will be where my heart is. It is what I care about. Everything I want to say through my work comes out of my feelings about that place—its positive aspects and its negative aspects. It’s one of the poorest counties in the state, but it is also a county with great lore and legend.”

“The art of William Christenberry achieves authenticity by making invisible emotions visible: his love of place, the gravity of memory, his desire to understand from whence he came.”

—Richard McCabe, Ogden Museum of Southern Art's Curator of Photography

Christenberry’s pilgrimages touched on the essence of what makes the abandoned shack, door hanging on a hinge with kudzu coming through the ceiling, magical: the influence of passing time. Over years and years, returning to the same subjects, his images capture the small universal shifts that typically go unobserved, unnoticed.

Ogden’s Curator of the Collection Bradley Sumrall describes this phenomenon in a companion essay written for the exhibition: “With each captured image, Christenberry is saving the landscape of his youth, both natural and man-made, from the passing of seasons and the entropy of oxidation and decay. Yet, by returning each year, and photographing the same places, he is documenting more than the object or moment—he is capturing time itself.”

One iconic example of this work is Christenberry’s documentation of The Palmist Building, displayed in Memory is a Strange Bell as a grid of twenty photos taken between 1961 and 1988. A small clapboard building on a red dirt road in Havana, Alabama, the structure was part of the fabric of Christenberry’s childhood—a country store on his father’s bread truck route, owned by his great uncle until his retirement. Later, it was rented out to Romani people who advertised their abilities to read palms and tell fortunes with a hand-painted palmist sign. When the landowner went one day to check in, he found the place in shambles—the residents nowhere to be found. He placed the sign upside down in the window frame to keep the rain out.

The very first image, taken in 1961—the year Christenberry left Alabama—is in black and white, focused on the intrigue of that inverted sign in the broken window, surrounded by chipping white paint. Over the course of the next several decades photo by photo, Christenberry switches to color; a tree grows to obstruct view of the window, lush in the summers, skeletal in the winters; the perspective shifts to the building’s side, widens, encompasses more of the surrounding landscape; the bushes grow and grow and grow, as does the china berry tree, until the building is almost entirely enveloped in green. And then, one day, it was in shambles. He continued to photograph the chinaberry. 

There’s a restraint to Christenberry’s photos, and though—as he’s attested to—the work is inescapably subjective, he resists that childish instinct to explore, to fill in the gaps, to wander or imagine. His photographs present pieces of a place, just as they are, and just as they are becoming. Ogden’s Curator of Photography Richard McCabe describes it as a rarity: “The art of William Christenberry achieves authenticity by making invisible emotions visible: his love of place, the gravity of memory, his desire to understand from whence he came.”

“The place is so much a part of me,” Christenberry told Hirsch. “I can’t escape it and have no desire to escape it. I continue to come to grips with it. I don’t want my work to be thought of as maudlin or overly sentimental. It’s not. It’s a love affair—a lifetime of involvement with a place. The place is my muse.”

Memory is a Strange Bell: The Art of William Christenberry will be on exhibition at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art until March 1, 2020. Learn more at ogdenmuseum.org. 

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