A Bygone Era: Christenberry's photo exhibit shows area bypassed by modern world

The ostensible subject of William Christenberry's photographs is the rural South, specifically Hale County, Ala., where he grew up. On a deeper level, these photographs are about isolation, loss, memory, death and the passage of time -- and about the kind of timeless, haunted beauty that Christenberry sees in all these processes.

Fifty-eight of his images are on view for another month in a traveling exhibition at Reynolda House. It's not nearly as large or as comprehensive as his last show in Winston-Salem, at SECCA in 1997, but it's a good introduction for those unfamiliar with Christenberry's work and worth seeing for longtime fans.

Christenberry didn't set out to become a photographer. In 1961 and early '62, when he lived in New York , he was an aspiring painter who occasionally took snapshots with a Brownie camera. Within a few years, photography moved to the center of his art practice. He continued to paint, as he still does, and he has created a substantial body of sculpture, but he is most widely known for his photographs.

The photographic emphasis of the show at Reynolda House is indicated by its title, "William Christenberry: Photographs, 1961-2005." The selection includes one token sculpture and a few of the old, hand-painted outdoor signs that he collects, typically after photographing them in their original sites.

Otherwise it consists of photographs spanning his career and depicting the kinds of subjects that have interested him from the beginning -- old houses, farm outbuildings, juke joints, crudely marked graves, red-dirt roads and overgrown expanses of kudzu and wisteria. He began taking such photographs, in the form of 3-by-5-inch snapshots, at the end of the 1950s, as an easy means of recording visual information for possible treatment in his paintings.

In a talk that he gave at Reynolda House two months ago, Christenberry said he didn't initially consider the photos to be of interest. "Never did I dream that the world of fine-art photography would embrace these images," he said.

Early encouragement from his professional forerunner Walker Evans prompted Christenberry's increasing devotion to photography. He visited Evans in New York in the early 1960s and showed him his snapshots of Hale County. In Christenberry's account, "Walker went through the pictures and said, ‘These are a perfect extension of your eye. I suggest you take these things seriously.'"

Christenberry followed Evans' advice because he admired and felt a kinship with him, largely because Evans made his iconic images of sharecroppers in Hale County in 1936, the year that Christenberry was born. By 1976 Christenberry's photographs were featured in his first New York solo exhibition.

Unlike Evans, Christenberry has always used color film, and he almost never photographs people. A rare exception is the Lady Who Makes Egg Carton Flowers, an inscrutable-looking woman sitting alongside a Winn Dixie paper bag on the porch of a country store in a 1983 photo included in the show.

The landscape in Christenberry's photographs looks like it has changed little since Evans' days.

Particularly effective in advancing Christenberry's main themes are several sequences in which old buildings are photographed from the same angles at different times over several years. A favorite subject he calls the "Palmist Building" -- an old house with a red palm-reader's sign displayed upside-down in a window -- appears in one such sequence. The final image reveals that the building was gone by 1988, with hardly a trace left behind.

Hand-painted, weather-worn signs on metal panels appear in several photographs, and three of the actual signs are in the show. Two are very crudely rendered, but the other one -- "Do You Believe in Jesus, I Do!" -- looks professionally painted. For this sign and the on-site photograph of it, Christenberry had to venture outside Alabama to Aberdeen, Miss., where the sign was originally posted on the property of Stephen Sykes, known for a junk-sculpture tower that he built alongside a highway about 60 years ago. I remember seeing it during my childhood, before it was torn down in the late 1950s. It was definitely William Christenberry's kind of place.

"William Christenberry: Photographs, 1961-2005" is on view through June 27 at Reynolda House Museum of American Art, 2250 Reynolda Road. For more information, call 758-5150.