This photograph, taken in 1976, is only one rendition of the scene. Numerous other photographs of the same view exist from William Christenberry’s annual rephotographing pilgrimages. Producing not only single images of a quickly disappearing regional visual and cultural identity, Christenberry returns annually to sites in Hale County, Alabama to rephotograph, thus placing his photographs in not only a historical but a contemporary context. Until their sometimes literal disappearances, buildings continue to have histories. Discussing one “portrait” session, Christenberry recounts that after photographing a shack on the outskirts of Greensboro, Alabama in 1971, he returned annually: “The next year, in the heat of July, I went back and photographed it again, and every year after that, too, until 1976, and it was no longer there. It had disappeared from the face of the earth, along with everything that had been in the yard.”¹ Viewed alone, this image already contained markers of landscape as a time-based construction, such as the immediately apparent age of the building and the contrasting Coca-Cola logos, but Christenberry’s rephotographing makes the passage of time visible, something essential to the construction of any view but too often lost in a photograph.
-Jacob Edwards
1 William Christenberry, Southern Photographs (New York: Aperture, 1983), 11.
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