William Christenberry’s Building, Hale County, Alabama (1967–2000), also known as The Underground Club, follows a single commercial building in Greensboro, Alabama, through its transformation from a general store into a juke joint.
The sequence emerged from Christenberry's longstanding connection to Hale County, where he spent childhood summers and later returned almost annually. These repeated visits transformed a familiar structure into a measure of place, memory, mortality, and passing time. Christenberry rejected nostalgia as the work's governing purpose, emphasizing instead how return visits reveal transformation and disappearance. The building's changing uses also reflect broader shifts in the Alabama Black Belt, a region shaped by agricultural decline, migration, and changing local economies. Although James Agee and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men informed Christenberry's engagement with Hale County, he did not intend to replicate their documentary project.
Across successive views, altered paint, weathered wood, improvised signage, and structural modifications can make the building appear to be several different places. Names associated with its changing identities include The Soul Wheel, The Shack, Barry's Place, and The Underground Night Club, while one photograph bears the words "UNDER GROUND." People remain outside the frame, but their presence is conveyed through these signs, repairs, commercial adaptations, and traces of social activity. Imperfect focus and hazy color flatten the structure and its surroundings, encouraging comparison across years rather than concentration on a single decisive moment.
Christenberry photographed the building in color from a predominantly frontal, street-level position, working in daylight and allowing the façade to occupy the center of the frame. His viewpoint recurs without being rigidly fixed: distance, lateral position, and framing shift between photographs as the building itself expands, is resurfaced, or changes shape.
A sixteen-print presentation appeared in Overnight to Many Cities: Tourism and Travel at Home and Away at 303 Gallery, New York, in 2001, followed by a presentation at The Photographers' Gallery, London, in 2002. The High Museum of Art acquired three dye-coupler prints.
