This exhibition is essentially a journey through his photographic work from 1961 to 2007 in more than three hundred photographs, many of them being shown for the first time. But Christenberry’s work can’t be separated from the other media he has worked with, such as sculpture, for example, of which we have assembled the most representative works. To this we must add, on the one hand, his work on the Ku Klux Klan, specifically The Klan Room, a work in progress that occupied him almost obsessively from 1961 to around mid-2000, and, on the other, a selection from his collection of advertising signs and found objects that reveal his interest in American popular culture. 

How did you go about selecting them? What themes?

Thanks to the artist’s generosity, I’ve had the good fortune to be able to study nearly his entire photographic archive. Based on this research, my primary objective was to show his obsessions, his themes and a few lesser known aspects of his work. In addition to the vernacular architecture of rural Alabama, its churches, abandoned houses and cemeteries, the exhibition demonstrates how from the 1970s new subjects appear in his work, like landscapes, unspectacular and antimonumental landscapes, or his vision of the city, hardly ever shown, like those of Beale Street in Memphis.  

Do you consider him a photographer, a painter or a sculptor?

Christenberry is primarily an artist who uses interchangeably several media (photography, painting, drawing, sculpture, installation) in order to fix the memory of a landscape he has traveled through and experienced over the years. His work is constructed as a dialogue between all the parts that make up his artistic trajectory and they should be examined as a whole. In doing so, his work achieves all of its evocative power and we can grasp its true size and scope. 

How do you describe his work to someone who`s never seen it?

Well I believe that one doesn’t describe art, it’s an experience, and, in that sense his work can produce in the spectator from a certain nostalgia for a society that is disappearing to the experience of isolation or loneliness. But we also find humor and irony.  What do you think the intent of his work is?Walker Evans said of William Christenberry’s photos that “they were like perfect little poems.” Certainly, that is some of the highest praise he’s had in his career. And not only because it comes from one of  the photographers he most admired, but also because it captures Christenberry’s own feeling towards his work. Undoubtedly his greatest aspiration is the poetic feeling the image can arouse: “I wish I were a poet, then maybe I could express these things in words, but I’m not. Of all the different kinds of artists, I think Iadmire poets the most.” 

How do you think he’ll be remembered?

I think William Christenberry will be remembered as one of the great narrators who helped shape the collective imagination of the twentieth-century American South, thus among a tradition of creators who, working with different forms—fiction, poetry, photography and film—have constructed this story. A story that speaks to us of landscapes, vernacular architecture, but that is also grounded in history, in the darkest sides of that American history marked by a civil war, economic inequality and racial conflict. He will also be remembered for his very early, innovative use of color photography, which in the sixties was considered vulgar and more befitting popular magazines than art. Christenberry incorporated the characteristics of amateur photography in his artistic practice at a time when few dared to do so, and that is another of his contributions. 

Where does he find his inspiration?

As I was saying, Christenberry finds his inspiration in his own experiences, in the memory of a world that is disappearing and that is being replaced by another that eliminates diversity and homogenizes our experiences. He finds his inspiration in the representation of time and memory, in the processes of transformation, death and, once in while, only once in a while, rebirth.  

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