Palmist Building by William Christenberry, made from 1961 to 1988 in Havana Junction, Alabama, repeatedly photographs an abandoned former general store as weather, vegetation, decay, and eventual disappearance transform the site. Once operated by Christenberry's great-uncle, it stood on the route between his grandparents' homes and joined observation of place to personal memory.
This family geography anchors a broader examination of time, loss, and Southern vernacular culture. Christenberry described his returns as a way to record "the traces of passing time" rather than recover a static past. The building's changing use, ruin, and disappearance also place the images within a region moving from agriculture-based economies toward urban and manufacturing ones, without assigning that transition as the specific cause of the structure's loss.
The long gray clapboard building is identified by a hand-painted "Palmist" sign set upside down in a broken window. The 1961 view is black and white, while the 1971 photograph is the first color view. Later pictures shift among frontal and oblique perspectives, elevations, doors, windows, and close studies of peeling whitewash and wood grain. Summer foliage nearly engulfs the building in 1980, while the 1981 winter view reveals more of its walls and windows. As a chinaberry tree gains visual presence, architecture yields to boards, weeds, and overgrowth in the 1988 site photograph.
Christenberry made the first image in 1961 with a Brownie camera and black-and-white film, producing a gelatin silver print. Such small photographs initially served as references and memory prompts for paintings, but Walker Evans encouraged him to consider them as photographs in their own right. Over subsequent decades, Christenberry worked across different formats, including Brownie cameras, 35 mm Kodachrome reversal film, and an 8 × 10 Deardorff view camera. Repeated visits, changing vantage points, seasonal contrasts, and detail studies created a serial method rather than strict rephotography from one fixed position. The photographs have subsequently circulated as chromogenic, dye-coupler, color-coupler, inkjet, and pigment prints, reflecting the work’s varied production and extended edition history.
Public reception began with Side of Palmist Building in Christenberry's 1973 Corcoran Gallery solo exhibition. The photographs later appeared in the 1996 traveling retrospective Reconstruction, the Smithsonian American Art Museum's 2006-07 Passing Time, the High Museum's 2018-19 Time & Texture, and the Ogden Museum's 2019-20 Memory Is a Strange Bell, where twenty images formed a grid. They were published in Southern Photographs in 1983 and the 2006 Aperture-Smithsonian monograph. Photographs from Palmist Building are held by the National Gallery of Art, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, High Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and Smithsonian American Art Museum.
