William Christenberry, Kudzu and House, Tuscaloosa County, AL 1979

William Christenberry, Kudzu and House, Tuscaloosa County, AL 1987

William Christenberry, Kudzu and House, Tuscaloosa County, AL 1988

William Christenberry, Kudzu and House, Tuscaloosa County, AL 1990

William Christenberry, Kudzu and House, Tuscaloosa County, AL 1991

William Christenberry, Site of Kudzu and House, Tuscaloosa County, AL 1992

"This is and always will be where my heart is. It is what I care about. Everything I want to say through my work comes out of my feelings about that place--its positive aspects and its negative aspects. It's one of the poorest counties in the state, but it is also a county with great lore and legend. In the nineteenth century it must have been like Gone With the Wind, a place with great southern plantations. It became clear to me during my graduate studies [1958-59, at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa] that I wanted to express my feelings about this place. To paraphrase William Faulkner, 'There is enough to write about on this little stamp-sized state called Mississippi to occupy me all of my life.'"

"Unlike Agee, Walker kept his distance emotionally. His view was objective. My stance is very subjective. The place is so much a part of me. I can't escape it and have no desire to escape it. I continue to come to grips with it. I don't want my work to be thought of as maudlin or overly sentimental. It's not. It's a love affair--a lifetime of involvement with a place. The place is my muse."

"Although my work is largely celebratory there is this dark side that permeates the South. How could I avoid the issues of the civil rights period and the terrible evil that manifests itself in the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)? I have often doubted whether or not I would live long enough to see the progress that the Deep South has made in civil rights, but there is still much to be done.

"Just a few weeks after my arrival in Memphis in 1962, James Meredith attempted to integrate the University of Mississippi, which is only sixty miles south of Memphis. In a way, Memphis is the big city of Mississippi. I was listening on the radio to the broadcast of that event. Two people were killed that night down in Oxford, Mississippi. How could I as a human being, forget being a Southerner, let that go by me? I've never been a marcher or a joiner, it's just not my nature, and sometimes I've regretted that. The only thing that I participated in along that line was the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers' March just before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed."

Photos from the Museum of Contemporary Photography. More work at Pace/MacGill. Interview from Light Reseach via ASX.