"Signs," the collection of 11 William Christenberry photographs on display at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, tells dual stories for fans of the disappearing American South.

It's tempting, but unfair, to compartmentalize these landscapes, shot during the 1970s and early 1980s, as documentary photographs.

In one medium format work, "Sign near Greensboro, Alabama, 1978," a billboard marking the future site of a business is captured mid-decomposition. The mere existence of the billboard, shot on a weedy lot bisected by a two-lane road and a clay lane, indicates that the business it heralded never came. The image serves as both a moral signpost and a literal warning to over-eager developers.

Christenberry, an Alabama native, often cites Walker Evans and James Agee's Depression-era book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" as a major influence, and "Palmist Building, Havana, Alabama, 1980" perfectly illustrates the photographer's fascination with the southern narrative. In the picture, a tree hulks over a long-abandoned fortune-teller's house, engulfing it with branches and leaves. Simultaneously fecund and foreboding, the home could be the backdrop of a story from Grimms' fairy tales, or a cast-off locale from "Night of the Hunter."

Though tiny in size, Christenberry's pictures of Beale Street, taken with a Kodak Brownie camera, are the most fascinating images in this exhibition. One photograph of a shuttered barbershop -- screen doors have been haphazardly nailed across the doorway -- is as much a homage to cubist painting as it is a depiction of the entertainment district pre-urban renewal.

This quartet of Beale Street photos, which date to the years when Christenberry was an assistant art professor at then-Memphis State University, documents a time most Memphians want to forget. Shot soon after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the images show a dilapidated section of town that seemed to be on its last legs. Still, the blues scene during that oft-overlooked era was thriving; Furry Lewis lived just off Beale Street in an apartment on Fourth Street, and octogenarian performer Gus Cannon was enjoying a revitalized career thanks to soul music label Stax Records.

Now, Beale Street has been reinvigorated, but the sites Christenberry chose to linger over -- the aforementioned barber shop, a blue-and-white faade, and a promising screen door that advertised Budweiser and Wonder Bread -- are gone.

While curator Marina Pacini pulled the images for this exhibition from the Brooks' permanent collection, "Signs" presages the arrival of a traveling retrospective, William Christenberry: Photographs, 1961-2005, which will be on view at the museum in late 2009.

Review

William Christenberry: "Signs"

On display at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art through June 21, 2009. For more information, go to BrooksMuseum.org.