Grave with egg carton cross, Hale county, Alabama
Image not available — this artwork is under copyright
View on museum website →Medium
chromogenic print
Dimensions
image: 11.75 × 7.94 cm (4 5/8 × 3 1/8 in.) sheet: 12.7 × 8.89 cm (5 × 3 1/2 in.)
Classification
Photograph
Department
CPH
Museum
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Credit
Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, by exchange: Duncan Phillips)
Accession Number
2015.19.5214
Art Historical Context
William Christenberry's *Grave with Egg Cart Cross, Hale County,* (1975) captures a poignant, makeshift roadside grave marker in the rural American South. The humble cross, fashioned from an everyday egg carton, stands as a testament to resourcefulness and reverence amid poverty. Photographed in Hale County—a region famously documented earlier by Walker Evans and James Agee in their 1941 work *Let Us Now Praise Famous*—this image reflects Christenberry's lifelong obsession with the decaying vernacular architecture and cultural artifacts of his native Alabama. A pioneer in fine-art color photo...
About the Artist
William Christenberry
William Christenberry (1936–2016) was an American artist whose career-long obsession with a small region of rural Alabama transformed the documentation of a place into one of the most sustained and poetic bodies of work in contemporary American art. Born in Hale County, Alabama — the same landscape made famous by James Agee and Walker Evans in their 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men — Christe...