Early images of Hale County, like this view of Main Street in Greensboro taken for the Office of War Information by famed photographer Walker Evans, are part of the county’s long legacy as a subject for some of the most well-known and significant images ever taken of rural America over the years. This week, the work of photographers William Christnenberry and RaMell Ross is featured in an exhibit in New York’s Pace Gallery.
The rest of the country may be catching on to what many here already know. “What if Hale County, Alabama is the Heart of America?” read a headline in the New York Times this week.
The piece centers on the photography of RaMell Ross and the late William Christenberry, two photographers who have chronicled the county in candid frames over the past decades.
Both photographers’ work is being exhibited now through Saturday at the Pace Gallery in New York in an exhibit entitled “Desire Paths: William Christenberry and RaMell Ross.” Ross, in addition to being a photographer, is also a documentary filmmaker. His 2018 film “Hale County: This Morning, This Evening,” which was mainly filmed in Greensboro, was nominated for an Academy Award.
Some of the best-known photographs of rural America have been taken in Hale County, beginning during the Great Depression, when photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee came here to work on a piece for Fortune magazine that eventually became the book, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Evans returned to the Black Belt, even shooting photographs in the same places he did decades before accompanied by Christenberry, whose family had Hale and Perry County roots and who counted Evans’ work as an inspiration.
Likewise, Ross names Christenberry’s work as an inspiration to him, and the county’s legacy of arresting images: simple, honest, and at times heartbreaking, continues into the 21st Century.
