Here’s a quiz for you:

What is the difference between these two photos? ((christenberry on top, leagle on bottom)) 

a. 27 years   b. art   c. $3,000.00   d. all of the above 

If you answered “d. all of the above”, give yourself a hand. The photo on the left is titled “5 Cents – Demopolis, Alabama, 1980” by William Christenberry. Original prints of this copyrighted photo are or have been on exhibit in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, among others, and a print of “5 Cents” recently sold for the above sizable sum online. 

The photo on the right is entitled “100_1154.jpg” by leagle. This non-copyrighted photo is currently on exhibit inside my digital camera and at least one computer hard drive, and a print may be obtained by right clicking and selecting “print picture”. I will personally sign your print for a dollar. 

That’s the difference between art and a snapshot.

Observant viewers will no doubt recognize “5 Cents” as part of the Coca-Cola advertisement painted on the side of the old Rosenbush warehouse downtown. Observant readers may remember the controversy surrounding this building that was discussed here. http://forums.demopolislive.com/showthread.php?t=14619  

I first heard of William Christenberry about 15 years ago when he was featured in Smithsonian magazine. His photographs, paintings and sculptures are immediately familiar to anyone who was raised around rural West Alabama. His photography evokes the great depression-era photographs that Walker Evans made of the Black Belt for the Farm Security Administration and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Christenberry was born and raised in Tuscaloosa, but spent his summers growing up in Hale County, which inspired his art in adulthood. He graduated from the University of Alabama, went north, and has taught at Corcoran College in Washington DC since 1968. 

An encounter with the Ku Klux Klan at the Tuscaloosa County Courthouse in the early 1960’s left him both fascinated and repulsed by the Klan and its imagery. He soon thereafter began work on his well known Klan Room, a multi-media construction next to his studio notable for a series of Barbie and GI Joe dolls of dressed as klansmen in their hooded robes (!), as well as paintings, sculptures and collage touching on the Klan.  

A remarkable thing about Christenberry’s art is the way he often revisits the same scenes, finding beauty what would commonly be called “blighted buildings” and documenting their decay over time. For instance this run-down Bar-B-Q shack in Greensboro: 

1976 

1981 

1989 

1991 

We all see and never notice places like this every day. I think it takes a particular kind of genius to focus on the unique in the commonplace, and find some dignity in the squalor.  

Now go out and take a drive, and see some art. 

Discuss this artcle in the forums, click here. 

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