In 2017 I was commissioned by Southern Distinction, a regional lifestyle magazine, to travel to Mobile Alabama and write about the SouthSounds music festival. The trip captivated my imagination, especially the contrast between the new south and the old south. This contrast is embodied in the work of photographer William Christenberry. I wrote an article chronicling my experiences downtown and my response to Christenberry's photography, which differs from the version in Southern Distinction. You can view the article as published by clicking here.
While on a tour of the Saenger theatre, built in 1927 and one of the oldest theaters in the continental United States, our tour group learned that the performers and shows booked by the theatre over the last two decades have played a key role in revitalizing the downtown. Designed in a Continental style intended to resemble French opera houses, the interior of the theatre has been thoroughly renovated and now features a redesigned stage, VIP facilities, and a state-of-the-art sound system. In addition to being the official home of the Mobile Symphony Orchestra, it also regularly hosts movie festivals, concerts, lectures and special events. The ornamentation brings together the old and new, the classical and modern, the Mediterranean and the American South: Poseidon looks down above the front entrance, Dionysus sits above the proscenium, Pan appears beneath the organ grills, while paintings of the Alabama Delta adorn the walls. Headliners now grace the revamped stage and play to sold-out crowds where once there were empty seats, gathering dust. On the final night of our tour my companions and I thrilled to a wall-shaking performance of Beethoven's 9th by the Mobile Symphony Orchestra. How fitting, I thought, that the region whose structures William Christenberry memorialized is witnessing this kind of renewal: the old being made new again, the south which he so loved being imbued with a new life.
Our entire weekend in Mobile was a whirlwind of activity: site visits, insights into the city’s past, present and projected future by our hosts, and memorable experiences of the city’s music, art and culinary treasures. We went from a renovated, deconsecrated church which is now a venue for weddings, concerts and parties to the Mobile Art Council to a music festival. From the festival we visited the Saenger theatre, where our hosts told us of the key role it has played in the revitalization of downtown Mobile. Peppered throughout the trip were meals at some of Mobile’s most popular dining destinations, both casual and upscale. We had dinner at OK Bicycle Shop, where sushi and tacos share space on the menu, after which we explored the South Sounds Music festival, with bands playing at venues throughout the downtown. Initially, we watched Blackwater Brass literally blow the crowd away with their brass syncopated sounds; then in the main square we watched Humminghouse serenade the audience. In the evening, at the final performance of the festival, we heard Infant Richard and the Delta Stones play for a rowdy, appreciative audience.
Another Time, Another Place
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| Blackwater Brass Performing at Mobile Alabama's SouthSounds Festival in April of 2017. Photo by Jeffrey Diedrick |
William Christenberry, who died on 28 November 2016, is one of America’s preeminent photographers. Although he worked in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture and assemblage, he was best known for his photographs of Hale County, Alabama, where he spent his childhood. His photography was initially inspired by a single book, the 1941 classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which James Agee's prose and Walker Evans's photographs documented and honored the lives of Depression-era farm families in the same region. In his adulthood Christenberry would make annual visits to Hale County, and he took an interest in buildings, especially isolated, decaying structures, which he would often photograph repeatedly. His preoccupation with these structures was related to his obsession with time, the old and the new, change and memory. These photographs are often haunting, since they seem to be seeking some hidden essence or mythic reality that time would indelibly alter--which explains why he returned to capture new images of the same structures and, more importantly, the new impressions they gave him. Viewing Christenberry’s images, which were on display at the Mobile Museum of Art during my spring 2017 trip to the city, were a highlight of my visit.
Mobile itself is something like Christenberry’s multiple images of the same place and space, fixing images that are destined to change as revitalization alters the past and with it, our impressions and our memories. As a first time visitor to Alabama, I was struck by the vitality of the downtown, and the way that past and present coexist here, intermingle, contribute to the resurgence of a southern city that honors many of its traditions and traditional structures while reimagining them in the twenty-first century. The city’s remarkable art, music and dining scene embody and celebrate this renaissance.
Christenberry's family kept a calendar of family events and William framed all of the pages of a particular year the moment it was passed down to him. These framed images convey a sense of the constancy of the family, a value passed down to Christenberry himself, who found it essential to capture and categorize images of the South, compile them and showcase them as a testament to where he came from and always returned to. As he is quoted as saying about these annotated calendars, “my father wrote in the death of his father. And if I outlive the death of my father, I will do the same. And I will hand on this calendar to our son, William Andrew III… it is a beautiful thing.” He did leave the calendar to his son, and, fortunate for us, his son left this calendar to the museum. Christenberry’s spirit accompanied me on my weekend tour of Mobile.
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| Saenger Theatre, Mobile Alabama, April 2017 |
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Our entire weekend in Mobile was a whirlwind of activity: site visits, insights into the city’s past, present and projected future by our hosts, and memorable experiences of the city’s music, art and culinary treasures. We went from a renovated, deconsecrated church which is now a venue for weddings, concerts and parties to the Mobile Art Council to a music festival. From the festival we visited the Saenger theatre, where our hosts told us of the key role it has played in the revitalization of downtown Mobile. Peppered throughout the trip were meals at some of Mobile’s most popular dining destinations, both casual and upscale. We had dinner at OK Bicycle Shop, where sushi and tacos share space on the menu, after which we explored the South Sounds Music festival, with bands playing at venues throughout the downtown. Initially, we watched Blackwater Brass literally blow the crowd away with their brass syncopated sounds; then in the main square we watched Humminghouse serenade the audience. In the evening, at the final performance of the festival, we heard Infant Richard and the Delta Stones play for a rowdy, appreciative audience.
The following day, we visited the Mobile Museum of Art, and William Christenberry was not the only photographer whose work we enjoyed. In fact, work by 11 mid-career photographers is featured in the Contemporary Alabama Photographer exhibit (which ended on August 27), work linked inextricably to William Christenberry's. There are shared themes and styles linking these 11 artists to Christenberry that he would have appreciated, and they are central to the development of the art scene in Mobile. Christenberry represents the South from the viewpoint of a native son, and at his zenith he was the most influential photographer of the South. The emergence of photographers who similarly seek to represent the South from their own viewpoints provide a more faceted and complex version of the region than one could have imagined decades ago. This exhibit deepened and enriched my appreciation of a complex Southern culture while making me appreciate its 21st century resurgence, especially in newly vital urban centers like Mobile. The increasingly rich and complex representations of the South in the work of these photographers is mirrored (or should I say echoed) in the Mobile music scene, as the South Sounds music festival testifies. While we were there, music greeted us night and a day, its beauty and variety combining odes to the old South as well as sonnets dedicated to the burgeoning new.
As the trip itself came to a close, I was left with impressions of energy, creativity, growth and renewal and of a culture whose roots go deeper than this short sojourn permitted me to fully explore. As I soaked in the city’s sights and listened to its melodies, I kept returning to William Christenberry, imagining how he might photograph the main stage of the South Sounds festival in the picaresque cathedral square. What came to mind was a spare image, as was his custom, of a skeletal metal structure constructed quickly, conveying impermanence but when frozen by a photograph possessing the incandescence and beauty that can only be imparted by a representation: a symbol of new life where once there was seeming decay. An image, and a facsimile, of rebirth.
Just as William Christenberry left the family calendar to the museum, I offer these words to the reader as a testament to the rich past, present and future of Mobile. It will repay many visits.
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