Kudzu, decay embody time's passage in Cheekwood's major William Christenberry exhibit

The French writer Maurice Blanchot compared images to cadavers—the remains left behind after the person is gone, bearing strong resemblances but without their essential living characteristics. The metaphor works neatly for photography, the art of catching traces of a scene as it inevitably evaporates. It works even more clearly in the photography and other art of William Christenberry, where the cadavers are usually the remains of buildings, which he often captures through the stages of decay—an allegory for Southern history and time itself.

Christenberry, the subject of a momentous show at Cheekwood, is one of the major Southern artists of recent years. A native Alabamian, he works across media and is most widely known for his photography. He has concentrated on the built landscape of the rural South—churches, barns, houses and stores embedded in (and sometimes engulfed by) the region's lush vegetation. These markers from the landscape merge with other visual emblems of Southern history, and Christenberry's memory and dreams, to create more complex and difficult visual associations.

Christenberry comes from Hale County, Ala., the location of James Agee and Walker Evans' 1941 documentary project on the lives of tenant farmers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Christenberry focuses on the buildings of this county, both as nearly abstract forms and as documents of the places where people live and work. He often returns to the same location year after year and ends up capturing how the building changes over time. Sometimes a building, like the green warehouse from Newbern, goes through different coats of paint and appears in different seasons and weather conditions over a number of years. Other times a building changes its purpose or gets rebuilt. In the most dramatic cases, an abandoned building succumbs to the inroads of vegetation and disappears.

Photographs of rural and small-town buildings get reworked into different media, particularly sculpture, but also paintings and drawings. Christenberry recycles the objects of his artistic attention and lets his dream-life come into play. One of his key series has been the Dream Buildings, skinny, sharply pointed structures that started as an image in a dream, but are derived from a church steeple. He has replicated this form in many variations, and created groups that look like clusters of skyscrapers.

The pointy Dream Buildings also share their shape with another one of Christenberry's key images, the pointed hood of the KKK. Active in Alabama when the artist was a kid there, the Klan was a menacing, not quite invisible presence. It sounds like Christenberry didn't see Klansmen in their robes often, but they were nonetheless in evidence, like the bar in Uniontown, Ala., named The Klub that Christenberry captured on film in 1964.

In Christenberry's hands, images converge as well as recycle. The same shapes and colors characterize the steeples of little country churches (usually painted white), expressions of the aesthetic genius, hard work and religious spirit of common people, and the Klan hoods, expressions of the terror in Southern and American history. The two elements are intertwined and unavoidable if, like Christenberry, you have eyes to look.

When Christenberry documents the changes in a building over time, time becomes the subject. These series raise the question of time's direction—is it a downward arrow of decay, or a circle of continuous regeneration? One series of four large photos and a smaller photo shows a small abandoned house. In the first photo the structure itself is plainly visible, but in each of the next three shots the vegetation gradually takes over, until all you see is a dense thicket. Another series concerns a country church in Sprott, Ala., which has an unusual double steeple design (closely affiliated in form with the Dream Buildings). The exhibit includes several photos of the church and a sculpture of it placed on a bed of Alabama red dirt. In the latest photo, the distinctive steeples are gone, replaced by a one-story extension. One can imagine the small congregation could not maintain the two steeples and rather than repair them, replaced them with something easier to manage.

The first series seems to depict time as a process of entropy, which fits within the tradition of Faulkner's fatalistic family histories and the evidence of kudzu spreading over the land. By contrast, Sprott Church can be seen as evidence of adaptation and renewal by a group of parishioners. But even that country church, still in use and receiving care, shows a retreat from beauty and grace. The new extension is generic and lacks the character of the original structure.

Time seems to function in many ways, not one way, for Christenberry. One more direction plays out in that photo of the Klan bar, which is bookended with a 2005 photo of the same building: The site has changed names and been painted, of all things, pink. Sure looks like the Klan has been decisively banished from the building—which, in this instance, gives time the last laugh.

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