“What I’ve been doing is in essence sort of recording … the passing of time”
William Christenberry (Harris, 2019)
My Tutor directed me towards Christenberry for his work with buildings – the red building (see Fig. 1) has similarities with The Red Hut at Rye Harbour.
Christenberry was born in Alabama in 1936, the year Agee and Evans arrived in the region en route to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Christenberry was a photographer of the American South since childhood, passing away in 2016. He took “lyrical pictures of vernacular Southern architecture as unrefined, genuine expressions of rural culture” (Harris, 2019). While the artist was based in Washington most of his adult life he returned to Hale County repeatedly.
In 1961 he moved to NYC where he met Walker Evans, whose FSA images of Hale County were particularly influential. Evans saw Christenberry’s photographs of buildings, taken with a Kodak Brownie as colour references for his painting, and encouraged him to develop his interest in photography. Indeed he returned to many of the places that Evans had photographed, recapturing them in b&w and thus starting a personal tradition of returning to places to follow their progress through time.
“My home county just seemed to me to be a part of my being. Living away from it has give me a perspective I don’t think I would have had if I stayed there.” (MAPFRE, 2013:98). Yet again we come across the importance of the documentary photographer as both outsider and insider, something I have commented on many times.
However it is as a pioneer of colour in the 1960s that Christenberry is known (apparently influenced by Eggleston?). Quoting Jean Kempf “the colour of reality is in fact the colour of photography” (MAPFRE, , 2013:13), which neatly fits in with the subject of my essay for the documentary course – it questions the reality of colour but relates it to memory. The saturated, somewhat unreal (not quite surreal but dreamlike?) look of the Christenberry’s aesthetic, commercially developed, were something he came to emphasise in his work and would later put him ahead of his time. Commentators disagree as to whether this is a snapshot aesthetic or if “the descriptive, impersonal sobriety of the view distance him from the heady sentiment of the snapshot” (MAPFRE, 2013:32).
Personally I see Christenberry as artist/collector whose early photographs are snapshots for his collection – the way this develops around time/memory/decay and the link between mankind is the “art” of the matter. “I’ve noticed that my eye collects” (Walker Evans, 32). Christenberry was also collected Southern objects, particularly handmade signs. He was familiar with the work of Duchamp, and one way these can be thought of is as found objects.
To create his art he used the ability of photography to beautify decay, as well as to preserve – creating documents which will gain in historical value (as well as financial, no doubt, as comparisons with his namesake Eggleston are made).
Christenberry says “I’m interested in mankind’s touch, or mankind’s effect, on these things” although mankind itself is conspicuously absent from most of his images – he was not comfortable being photographed himself, nor did he wish to impose on others. But in his work Christenberry distils the culture of a people into its crumbling architecture. “His houses … embody the relationship between human beings and time” (MAPRFRE, 2013:41)
Later, encouraged by his friend Lee Freidlander in 1977, Christenberry would switch to a large format 8 x 10 camera – this must have been quite an adjustment from the Brownie.
Christenberry performed an artistic exploration of the psychology of place. In creating these memorials he is also exploring his own memory. The South was changing. Many buildings he has photographed many times over decades. So the photographs are about recording time changing. Sometimes these photographs are presented as grids, which are non-systematic and therefore lyrical according one commentator, distinguishing them from say the Becher’s oeuvre. Things that seem static are revealed as impermanent. By photographing the red hut at Rye repeatedly in different landscapes I might be able to emphasise the longer-term impermanence of the landscape itself? I realise that the total decay and collapse recorded in Christenberry’s work will not occur at Rye Harbour, a protected space with a few iconic places that will be preserved. Romero (in an essay from the monograph) describes the buildings he records with his camera as characters in his story, viewed from many angles as we follow them through time. Again I do not have Christenberry’s time to record over many years for my degree project, but I can approach my subjects from many angles.
From 1973 he also made sculptures of the buildings that he photographs (he calls these “building constructions”), and photographed these models too. These are not scale models, but creations from his memory with his photographs as reference. “I didn’t want it to be exact. I wanted it to have the feeling of what I experienced seeing” (MAPFRE, 2013:20). Hence Christenberry may chose a particular point in time in a building’s history to represent it (or perhaps some amalgam in his memory?), overlooking more recent decay particularly if it has been dramatic. One author considers this decontextualisation, comparing this to the surrealists. It was interesting to me how the three essays in the monograph did not complement each other but re-addressed the same material, sometimes disagreeing. In a way each is adapting the work to their own reading.
As the buildings and signs of the south that he loved began to disappear in the 1970s, the monograph essay suggests that Christenberry also chose to record unremarkable landscapes, such as Building in Kudzu (1983). Even this can be seen as steeped in meaning, since kudzu is known as “the vine that ate the South”, growing a foot a day when established! However I note that Christenberry was photographing kudzu back in 1962 in b&w – another lesson in how the artist’s journey is at least in part created by the context provided by commentators, in conjunction with the images they select to illustrate their narratives? One of these discusses how the essence of his photography is his choice of what to depict (or not) and how to do so – this is somewhat obviously the photographic method but also that of its critics.
The model approach may be extendable to my work – having found two different versions of The Red Hut at Rye Harbour (one a life-size model copy of the other) this suggests other models, perhaps at different scale? These can then move around the landscape, suggesting how it changes (keeping the hut static in the frame). One issue to consider/overcome is the scale of the surroundings – e.g. beach pebbles will seem much bigger next to a scaled down model hut. However the wide open spaces are helpful, which may lend themselves to playing with perspective just as I have done before for fun at the Bolivian salt flats.
Christenberry’s work expanded into installations, sometimes controversially – for example The Klan Room is intended to express his abhorrence, but has an almost reverential or shrine-like feel to it developed over 33 years as a collection of hundreds of objects, kept hidden in his studio until 1983. Guernica was extremely influential on this work, and he initially photographed the Klan in a clandestine manner in b&w, despite having otherwise abandoned it for colour.
Christenberry extended the model work into his Dream Building series, not based on real constructions but a more psychological approach where the sharply pointed roofs for example recall the shape of Klan hats.
While his approach may seem quirky it is underlined by a most remarkable experience. He photographed his childhood home for many years, following it after it was abandoned until it seemed it would disappear completely. At which point one section was uprooted and re-attached to a different house 6 miles away … there are many strange stories of the South and this one somehow underlines for me the point of what Christenberry was doing.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
- Christenberry, W. (1983) Red Building in Forest. At: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/william-christenberry-william-christenberry (Accessed 30.8.2022).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Casper, J (s.d.) William Christenberry. Amsterdam: Lens Culture. At: https://www.lensculture.com/articles/william-christenberry-william-christenberry (Accessed 8.8.2022)
- Harris, G. (2019) Time and Texture. Georgia, USA: High Museum. At: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ejc_OYACDM (Accessed 8.8.2022)
- MAPFRE. (2013) William Christenberry. New York: D.A.P.
- Mostow, J. (2020) Photography in Focus: William Christenberry. New York: Pace Gallery. At: https://www.pacegallery.com/journal/photography-focus-william-christenberry/ (Accessed 8.8.2022)
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