Ghosts on Beale Street
Photographing Memphis before the tourists showed up
by Diann Blakely and Stanley Booth
Interest in Alabama’s contributions to the fine arts—indeed, surprise that the state has made any—continues to enjoy the revival brought about by last year’s film Capote and by the national acclaim instantly heaped on Mockingbird, the new (and only) biography of Truman Capote’s friend Harper Lee. Monroeville, Ala., is Capote’s childhood haunt and Lee’s birthplace, which she immortalized in her only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s also a dirt clod’s throw from Hale and Greene counties, made visually famous by Walker Evans in James Agee’s classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Perhaps not the easiest artistic legacy for a native photographer like William Christenberry to contend with.
Christenberry began his career by leaving Alabama and moving to Memphis in the early 1960s to accept a job at the institution now called the University of Memphis. The current issue of Aperture, the national journal of fine art photography, showcases some never-before-published photographs taken by Christenberry in 1960s Memphis. The exchange of influence between Christenberry and the man often cited as the father of modern color photography, William Eggleston, is undeniable. The Aperture photographs feature a barber shop sign, a cracked doorway decorated with a political bumper sticker, a florist shop window—the empty, somewhat menacing weirdness associated with some of Eggleston’s best work. Both their menace and weirdness is increased exponentially when we recall that the site on which Christenberry shot them, Beale Street, was no Blues Disneyland at the time but a rundown and dangerous area of town inhabited primarily by thugs and ghosts.
It’s too often forgotten that Deep South visionaries like Eggleston, Christenberry, and indeed, Sally Mann, whose Deep South recently landed on bookstore shelves, don’t simply look through lenses and push the button, but are thoroughly versed in every aspect of their craft, technical and otherwise. For example, an extensive amount of Christenberry’s early work was done with the common-man’s camera of the ’50s, the Kodak Brownie Bull’s Eye. He had prints of the 620 film made on 8-by-10 color paper and hired a cabinet maker to build boxes to hold the exquisitely beautiful images, many of them featuring graves and country churches. The only problem was that, in those pre-computer days, each print cost him around $10. Combined with the expense of those finely crafted oak and pine boxes, the whole endeavor became a formidable proposition.
Christenberry’s next step was to acquire a large-format camera and continue shooting similar images. Then he began making constructs, the most famous—and controversial—of which is called “The Klan Tableau.” “It caused a flap,” says Christenberry, these being years in which the Klan still held rallies in Overton Park. He continues to work on that project, as well as the photographs for which he is best known. Indeed, for a sensibility drawn to ghosts, to houses that appear a bit more covered in kudzu each year, it’s little wonder that Christenberry, now living in Washington, D.C., still makes an annual pilgrimage to Alabama, where he takes most of the photographs he works on for the rest of the year—many of them images of houses that could easily have been inhabited by Boo Radley
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