Same Place, Not the Same Time

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The New York Sun

In his long career, the photographer William Christenberry has covered a lot of the same ground – but very much on purpose. Since the 1960s, he has made frequent returns to his hometown of Hale County, Ala., to photograph how specific spots have changed with time.

Imagine driving down a main road in your hometown for 40 years, slowly watching the landscape change. Mr. Christenberry captures those changes in the span of five or ten photographs, and the simplicity of those changes is striking. He lovingly shows that while buildings disappear, trees die, and people move on, they can be kept alive through art and memory.

The work of Mr. Christenberry is brought together in a large-scale book containing 160 images (Aperture, 204 pages, $50). The publication coincides with an exhibit of photographs, sculptures, and drawings at the Aperture Foundation beginning July 6. The book contains two essays – by the founding director of the Menil Collection in Houston, the late Walter Hopps, and a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Howard Fox – and an introduction by the a director of the Smithsonian Museum, Elizabeth Broun.

Both Hopps and Mr.Fox highlight the most popular aspects of Mr. Christenberry’s work, such as photographic series of buildings, including the Palmist Building in Havana Junction, Ala., and the Bar-B-Que Inn in Greensboro, Ala. Both scholars also pay particular attention to a small series of photographs taken at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Memphis, Tenn., in 1966. Those mid-decade photographs led the artist to compose “The Klan Room,” a collection of dolls, sculptures, and photographs inspired by that rally. The photographs of the eerie, hooded figures dressed in purple satin robes with eye slits sewn almost shut are coldly evil in contrast to the serene calm of his hometown studies. But this succeeds by giving historical context to a book that is mostly a study of buildings and landscapes.

Born in 1936, Mr. Christenberry was a contemporary of William Eggleston, Jasper Johns, and other pioneers of modern art and photography.What sets Mr. Christenberry apart is his pointed devotion to the places where he grew up. He pays tribute to the American South, capturing secret nooks and buildings that would have easily disappeared with time. Collected here, the photographs draw the viewer into a lost world and spark the imagination.


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