Category Archives: photography

Photographing Churches

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IMG_1059    O! How I love time spent south of the salt line in December! We were all doubtful that I’d be able to see my friends Deb and Jeana Brunson in Fairhope this year but they arrived in town on Thursday, my last day at The Grand, from Las Cruces, New Mexico, and Tallahassee, Florida, respectively.

We gathered for afternoon tea at The Grand with Deb and Jeana, their brother Richard and his wife, Allison, and Allison and Richard’s dapper youngest son, William, who insisted on wearing a tie for tea at The Grand. I helped him tie the tie and commented that with his blue blazer, button-down shirt and tie, and khakis, he looked like an Alabama frat boy headed to a game. All of the Brunsons had a Christmas concert to attend but Deb, Jeana, Allison, Richard, and I met later for a memorable meal at Dragonfly Foodbar in downtown Fairhope.

During dinner, I mentioned that I was out of Mardi Gras beads and Allison and Richard insisted that I stop by their house and get some of their stash. Later, at their beautiful home on Mobile Bay, Allison and Richard not only brought out a load of shiny beads from storage, but they also insisted on untangling them, separating them by size, and tying each bundle together before they loaded them into a huge box which should fulfill my Mardi Gras bead needs for a while. Allison Brunson sorting Mardi Gras beads  Richard Brunson sorting Mardi Gras beads

It is a true friend, I realize, who will sort and tie your Mardi Gras beads.

As I headed north from Point Clear on Friday, I realized that it was December 19 and I had not photographed any churches for my 2015 Christmas card. Realizing that there was still plenty of time and that there were a couple of back-up buildings I might use in north Alabama, I decided to keep my eyes open for any Christmas card-worthy churches along the drive home. In an earlier post for this journal, I recount my criteria for my annual Christmas card designs. I look for buildings that are often vernacular, were photographed in the month of December, and are always honest.

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On this most recent trip, I had already taken photographs of Little Bethel Baptist Church in Daphne. Traveling along Alabama SR 225 in rural Baldwin County, I decided to check out St. John’s, a small yellow Catholic chapel that I had passed many times before but never photographed. As I pulled away from St. John’s, I noticed a small white building through the trees. I pulled off the road again and discovered what looks like a former schoolhouse that is now designated as “James E. Cook Memorial Presbyterian Chapel.” It is a charming little church I had never before noticed.

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A few hours later, approaching Montgomery, I remembered the small town of Lowndesboro off U.S. Highway 80 between Selma and Montgomery. Highway 80 from Selma to Montgomery has been designated by the National Park Service as the “Selma to Montgomery National Voting Rights Trail,” a national scenic byway. Turning off 80 onto CR 29 into Lowndesboro, one travels through an impressive and well-maintained collection of antebellum architecture compressed into a very brief stretch of road. I have been to the town several times now, but it is always a shock to see such pristine examples of domestic and non-secular architecture in such a compact little community (population 140).

A particular oddity among the roadside attractions of Lowndesboro is the C.M.E. church, erected around 1830. Instead of a traditional steeple, the building is topped by a structure which was the original dome of the first Alabama state capitol in Cahaba. It was moved to Lowndesboro and mounted on the church when the original capitol building in Cahaba was demolished. IMG_1042

IMG_1035St. Paul’s Episcopal is a stately and dignified structure. Lowndesboro Baptist has intricate Carpenter Gothic detailing in the wooden columns on its portico. Lowndesboro Presbyterian (pictured at the front of this post) has simple Doric columns. IMG_1047

The only one of the impressive old churches that did not make the cut was Lowndesboro United Methodist. The main structure is very handsome but I couldn’t get past the steeple, which just couldn’t quite live up to the building’s base. Alabama-native writer Eugene Walter, who was quoted in an earlier post, referred to such steeples as “little-prick.” I now regret not taking a picture of the building, since it was a lovely church (other than that unfortunate steeple) and I likely won’t be back in Lowndesboro for a while.

Lowndesboro was a treasure trove in my search for picturesque churches. After roaming the street and photographing for about an hour, I drove away with the certainty that I have now found my Christmas card image for 2015. The challenge will be choosing just one out of many.

A playwright friend recently sent a note from Los Angeles and said “it isn’t Christmas at our house until your church arrives!” It is because of such kind words from many friends and correspondents that I take particular pride and effort in my December sojourn to photograph churches and other images of the season throughout Alabama.

Merry Christmas.IMG_1055

Christenberry: Bearing Witness

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IMG_0838  I have had a couple of opportunities to hear artist William Christenberry speak and on each occasion he recounted how his mother worried that, based on his work, people would think that Alabama was just some “rusted out, worn down, bullet-ridden place.”

Christenberry’s work focuses on memories of a fading South and his photographs capture buildings and landscapes in decay. He often photographs the same places year after year and documents how places evolve or disappear or ultimately break down completely.

One such sequence, the “Palmist Building” series begun in 1961, is among Christenberry’s iconic images. The earliest photographs of the building show an abandoned and dilapidated wooden structure. A sign advertising a palmist has been placed upside down in a broken window as protection from the weather. Subsequent images over years show the progression of the building’s decay amidst growing vegetation. In the later images, the building is completely gone, and trees, vegetation, wire fencing, and a utility pole stand beside a lonely road. Similar photographic series include “Church, Sprott, Alabama,” “Green Warehouse,” and “Coleman Café.”

I have never shared Mrs. Christenberry’s concern about her son’s work, but she addresses a basic misunderstanding of the South by people who don’t really know the place. By capturing fade and decay, Christenberry is preserving images of a South that is disappearing … has largely disappeared. His predilection for finding and recording old buildings, abandoned places, overgrown landscapes – a predilection I share and which makes Christenberry’s work special to me – is driven by a need to bear witness rather than by nostalgia. Christenberry focuses on rural landscapes but the impulse seems to me to be the same as my attraction to rust and industrial decay found in urban environments. Some misinterpret these images as representations of what the South is today but Christenberry captures and honors them as a rapidly disappearing landscape.

William Christenberry was born in 1936 in Tuscaloosa and left Alabama in 1961 to live and work in New York, Memphis, and finally Washington, D.C. where he has lived and taught at the Corcoran since 1968. Still, his preferred landscape for his art focuses on the environs of Alabama’s “Black Belt,” an area of rich black soil that cuts through the center of the state, where both sets of his grandparents resided. Hale County, “ground zero” for Christenberry’s art, was also the location for James Agee and Walker Evans’s iconic Depression-era book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a hypnotic and microscopic examination of the lives of three Alabama tenant farm families.

Occasionally, as I drive around the Black Belt in west Alabama, I will accidentally stumble across a place that Christenberry has photographed. I am startled at the discovery, stunned at the recognition, and often feel like I have witnessed some elusive ancient treasure.

Christenberry’s art encompasses painting and drawing, sculpture, and assemblage but he is primarily known for his photography. It was photographer Walker Evans himself who became a sort of mentor to Christenberry when they met in New York in the early 1960s after Christenberry finished his M.F.A. at Alabama. Evans steered Christenberry along the path of a concentration on photography after viewing snapshots Christenberry had made with a cheap Brownie camera as studies for expressionist paintings.

Often, in his sculptures, Christenberry takes the same buildings he has photographed and does three-dimensional reproductions of them, often resting on an authentic bed of Alabama red clay in a shallow box. Over time, these more realistic depictions have given way to solid white “dream buildings” and ghostly structures drawn from memory and iconographic imagery – ladders, gourds, signs, structures on stilts. Christenberry’s evocative art never tells the viewer what to think; he presents it and allows one to ponder and meditate on it, to explore the implications.

There are many books of Christenberry’s art available. These would be of interest to the uninitiated as well as those who already know the artist’s work. A couple of my favorites are Trudy Wilner Stack’s Christenberry Reconstruction: The Art of William Christenberry (1996) and William Christenberry (2006) with thoughtful essays by Walter Hopps, Andy Grundberg, and Howard N. Fox.

My articles about William Christenberry and Walker Evans with several multimedia links may be found at http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org.