graphy. In 1968, Christenberry, usingLet Us Now
Praise Famous Menas a guide, sojourned to Hale
County to re-photograph the sites that Evans had
memorialized 32 years earlier. He has continued to
make the annual pilgrimage ever since.
Christenberry photographed exclusively with the
Brownie until 1977, when he turned to the more
professional and technically daunting large-format,
8 1000 Deardorff view camera. The simplicity of the
Brownie format freed the photographer from tech-
nical concerns, allowing him to focus on the imme-
diacy of his subject matter and achieve an
impressionistic, snapshot aesthetic. The elaborate
view camera, which had to be carefully positioned,
each frame laboriously composed, resulted in an
entirely different but equally beautiful image. The
variability of aperture and focus allowed for a fine-
grained negative with precise, crisp detail. Christen-
berry retained his frank, frontal compositions,
although the camera’s depth of field required him
to stand at a greater distance from his subject,
thereby incorporating more of the space surrounding
buildings (Southall 1990). He has continued to use
both photographic formats to achieve different ends.
While the younger photographer shared some
of his predecessor’s concerns for capturing the
poetic qualities of time and place that character-
ized rural Alabama, he was not simply recreating
or quoting Evans’s vision. Christenberry felt a
deep personal relationship to Evans’s and Agee’s
work based on his childhood experiences and
intimate knowledge of the places and even the
distant relatives of the families the two men vis-
ited. However, Christenberry desired his pictures
to imbue something of the losses of past, as well
as speak to the present and the renewal of the
South, all while encapsulating the regions rich
textures and mysteries. Perhaps because his
works achieve such a formal purity in their direct
compositions, clear contours, and colors, they
evoke timelessness or the slow passage of time
rather than simply nostalgia. In fact, Trudy Wil-
ner Stack has described the photographer’s inten-
tion as a reconstruction and discovery of his own
impressions alongside those of modernism’s pro-
digies, namely his wide-ranging artistic and lit-
erary influences (Stack 1996).
It is noteworthy that Christenberry was never
drawn to the languid antebellum mansions, many
of which remained in the Hale County environs.
Under his watchful eye, Christenberry’s subject
matter—the Palmist Building, the Green Ware-
house, Sprott Church, the cotton gin of Havana
Junction, the humble, gravelly gravesites of Hale
County—seems to come alive with a vibrant
energy, despite the fact that most of these sites
have been long abandoned as relics of their oft-
troubled past. In fact, the 20-mile radius that
comprises Christenberry’s focus has remained vir-
tually unchanged since Evans’s time (Southall
1990). Although one might expect strip malls,
billboards, neon signs, and the other outcroppings
of postwar development to have long since
invaded and taken over, no McDonald’s or its
like exists in Hale County. In Christenberry’s
photographs, the old buildings and landscapes
seem to mythically reappear—year after year—as
they are inextricably intertwined with Christen-
berry’s memories and the viewers’ own associa-
tions. Past and present are thus married in these
lyrical portraits of the American Deep South.
Metaphorically speaking, the images reference
life cycles and suggest the residue of human exis-
tence, despite the fact that the human figure
rarely appears. According to Rebecca Walker,
‘‘Courageously, methodically, he [Christenberry]
documents one hundred little deaths as the houses
and roads and general stores of his childhood
change form and face and, eventually, disappear’’
(Reynolds and Walker 1996).
As an illustration of his working process, con-
siderKudzu and House, Tuscaloosa County, Ala-
bama (1989), a structure that he photographed
over a 13-year period. The kudzu, a fast-creeping
green vine that grows over much of the Southeast,
had nearly engulfed the modest tenant’s shack on a
hill in 1990. Then, one year later, Christenberry
returned, fully expecting the house to be buried
under the persistent vines; however, the kudzu
had been cut back. And in 1992, the structure had
been razed, preparing the reddened, virgin land for
something else. His 1991 and 1992 photographs of
the site document this narrative. In relation to this
and other subjects, Christenberry has spoken of a
desire to ‘‘possess’’ his subjects (the buildings in
particular), to make material and tactile what is
fleeting and evanescent. Alongside his photo-
graphs, he has continued to make paintings and
small, free-standing sculptures of the various build-
ings he visits. He memorialized the ‘‘kudzu shack’’
two years later with such a sculpture.
Christenberry’s iconography finds form in
many media, including paintings and drawings
collaged with found objects, sculptural reincarna-
tions of the photographed sites, as well as the
more troubling mixed-media installation known
asThe Klan Room, begun in 1962. He has spo-
ken about his desire to memorialize the fullest
history of his Southern roots, a place rife with
conflicts between good and evil, black and white,CHRISTENBERRY, WILLIAM