Untitled Document

William Christenberry is a storyteller. Literature and oral tradition are the main influences in his work, though he works solely in visual forms. He began as a painter, leading him into sculpture and installation, but ended up as one of the pioneers of American color photography (Lange 25).

Christenberry bases his work on his home state of Alabama. His focus is on the past, the eroding of Southern culture through its physical decay (Seidel 1). Christenberry chooses to depict the simple architecture of the rural south instead of its better-known mansions (Ogden 1). Claiming that the Alabama landscape is so ingrained in him that it is him, Christenberry believes that the place that you come from creates who you are (Ogden 1). He has no desire to be categorized as a Southern artist or Alabama artist, but he believes that art come out of what you know, and what he knows best happens to be regional. His work has a universality, but that is often overlooked because of its direct associations to the South (Alabama Arts 1).

Inspired by Pop Art in the 1950s, Christenberry gave up painting and focused instead on collage and assemblage. This new approach suited his Southern imagery, incorporating that region’s folk art of simple techniques and found materials (Lange 29). While using this medium, Christenberry began using Africa motifs, paying homage to the South’s unspoken cultural heritage (Seidel 1). Being interested in the change in objects over time, Christenberry was led to photography and the revisiting of sites repeatedly. He has returned to photograph some buildings even after they have been torn down (Lange 29). Photography led Christenberry back to sculpture when he began translating photos back into three dimensions, recasting his images of churches into models (Lange 30). Recently, he has begun photographing buildings in extreme close-up with an 8x10 camera in order to underline their abstract, formal qualities. He blows these up to large sizes in commemoration of his first exposure to art: “the heroic, painterly canvasses of abstract expressionism” (Ogden 1).

One of Christenberry’s major foci is the Ku-Klux Klan. He confronts it as a symbol of fear and power and continued racial persecution. The shape of the Klan headgear can be seen hinted in Christenberry’s architectural depictions (Lange 31). His main depiction of the Klan is through dolls and scaled-down environments that somehow still convey the terror and menace of the KKK (Tullos 84). Ironically, these scaled down environments, and presentations such as tying up or mutilating the dolls, seem like they should be ways of disempowering the Klan, but they only serve to underline the horror it presents (Seidel 1). Christenberry has been told that the Klan is “not the proper concern of an artist or of art” (Tullos 85), but he holds that when the time is right certain artists must “examine and reveal such strange and secret brutality” (Tullos 85).

I came across William Christenberry accidentally while doing a Google search for disappearing places. I found a very direct connection between his work and my proposed work for the semester in his photography of Southern architecture. Much as I want to show the physical aspect of our method of dealing with history, he deals with the physical aspect of the disintegration of southern culture. I also identify with his ideas about the interconnection of a person to the place that they are from, so much that I am considering focusing on Baltimore architecture since I know it best. I realized that my concern with the destiny of outmoded architecture has been a particular social question in Baltimore that my family has felt connected to since I was a child. Also, Christenberry has succeeded in capturing the emotion of a place and given it life without including people in the scene. This is an idea that I was struggling with as I developed my idea and shot photos of the various sites that I visited.