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Southern Cultures 2011 Center for the Study of the American South

Published by the University of North Carolina Press

INTERVIEW
Those little color snapshots

William Christenberry

interviewed by William R. Ferris

William Christenberry: Im fascinated by rural graveyards, where people will make the most wonderful objects out of necessity. If they cant afford to buy elaborate flower decorations, they will make things, in this case out of egg cartons. Grave, With Egg Carton Cross, Hale County, Alabama, 1975, vintage Kodak Brownie, 3 5, courtesy of Hemphill Fine Arts.

Church, Sprott, Alabama, 1977, vintage Kodak Brownie, 3 5.

Building with False Brick Siding, Warsaw, Alabama, 1974, vintage Kodak brownie, 3 5.

Building with False Brick Siding (as in earlier photograph directly above), Warsaw, Alabama, 1991, archival pigment print, 44 55, Edition of 9.

Photographs by William Christenberry, courtesy of Hemphill Fine Arts.

William Christenberry, William Eggleston, and Walker Evans have defined southern photography just as profoundly as Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and C. Vann Woodward shaped southern literature and history. Both groups are bound by their deep love for the American South and by their admiration for one anothers workan admiration that I share. Walker Evans first introduced me to Bill Christenberrys work in 1973, shortly after he and Bill had traveled together to Hale County, Alabama. I met Bill not long after that trip, and we have been close friends ever since.

Our understanding of sense of place and how it shapes southerners is significantly deepened by Bill Christenberrys vision for his work. His desire to possess dog-trot houses, country stores, and churches in Hale County first led him to photograph, then build miniature sculptures of these buildings. Once completed, he placed each building on a base of red clay soil that he brought from Alabama. While these buildings evoke pastoral memories of the rural South, Christenberry is not afraid to challenge romantic notions about his home region, as he strives to [deal] with what I see as both the beautiful aspects of where Im from and also... the ugly or dark aspects. Calling his Ku Klux Klan series the most difficult to express, he summons the terror of Klan violence in tableaus that reveal a strange and secret brutality.

Bill Christenberry is nurtured by his Hale County roots and has drawn on them throughout his teaching career at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, D. C., where he has worked since 1968. Just as William Faulkner created the mythic Yoknapatawpha County to frame his literary legacy, Christenberry draws on his own little postage stamp of native soil in Hale County as inspiration for his photography, painting, and sculpture.

This interview was recorded and filmed during the summer of 1983 at Bill Christenberrys studio in Washington, D.C., as part of my film Painting in the South. The film accompanied an exhibit, Painting in the South: 1564-1980, organized by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Virginia.

William Christenberry, in his own words...

My interest in photography comes out of a background in painting. As a student at the University of Alabama in the mid to late 1950s, I began to look around West Central Alabama (the part of Alabama that Im from) and see things that I wanted to try to paint, but I didnt know how to go about it. Santa Claus had brought me and my sister a small Brownie camera in the late 1940s, and I just loaded it with color film and went out to that Alabama landscape and began to photograph what caught my eye, especially rural architecture and graveyards in the country. Back in the studio, those little color snapshots were references for paintings that were quite expressionistica lot of gesture and rich surface quality, but with subject matter.

Santa Claus had brought me and my sister a small Brownie camera in the late 1940s, and I just loaded it with color film and went out to that Alabama landscape and began to photograph what caught my eye, especially rural architecture and graveyards in the country. I never thought of them as art or as serious photographs until later, when I met Walker Evans [here] in New York and he asked to see some of the little snapshots. Photograph courtesy of the Collections of the Library of Congress.

I first met Bill Eggleston in 1962, when I moved to Memphis. I think his interest in photography increased my interest in photography, because I continued to make those little snapshots for a number of years. As I said, they were references for paintings. I never thought of them as art or as serious photographs until later, when I met Walker Evans in New York and he asked to see some of the little snapshots. But that didnt change the way I looked at things or what I looked at. Then, when I moved to Washington, D.C. in 1968, Walter Hopps [Director of the Corcoran Gallery, 1967-72] encouraged me to begin exhibiting the little snapshots.

Photography for me is a wonderful means of expression, but it is not the only thing that I try to do as an artist. Its just part of it, along with drawing and sculpture, and although this does not include painting since at least 1968, I dont doubt that someday I might like to try painting again. But photography is just a part of a total means of expression that crosses over between several means.

Southern writing, and southern literature, has had a greater influence on my work than the work of other visual artists. I dont doubt or deny that other visual artists have played a big part in what I do. In more recent years Walker Percy, along with other people and their work, has had a profound influence on what I try to express in my work. I dont know if its possible to do visually what they are doing with the written work, but I feel very strongly that its worth a challenge. Thats what its all about for me.

CAUGHT UP IN THAT ONE PARTICULAR PLACE

Ive often wondered if I would be doing the kind of work Im doing if I lived where I grew up, in Alabama, because I find that being 900 miles away in Washington gives me a perspective on homealmost a sense of mysterythat I really enjoy. I find it very difficult to work in other places. It takes me a while to get adjusted to a landscape other than Alabamas, even when I come into Mississippi, which is not really different from Alabama. But if I go to California, or even in Washington [D.C.], I dont make photographs. I never quite understood that about myself. I guess Im just sort of caught up in that one particular place in Alabama, and when I come home on a trip in the summer, I cant wait to go out in the country. Im so charged up after being all those months in Washington. And yet I look at Bill Eggleston, who lives in Memphis and makes his forays and pictures down there, and I respect that. Im not saying that if I lived in Alabama I couldnt do it; I just wonder about it.

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