Untitled 1982 - 1984

This eerie gelatin silver print was made by William Christenberry who was born in 1936. The hood looms out of a dark background, lit softly. It’s rendered in shades of grey and white and has that slightly blurry effect that you get with gelatin prints. It reminds me of a Francis Bacon painting, where the subject seems to be emerging from a shadowy space. What’s going through Christenberry’s head, I wonder? He grew up in Alabama, surrounded by the legacy of the KKK, and this photograph really seems to face up to that history. The banality of the hood itself, the material it’s made of, almost like a child’s Halloween costume. Is he investigating something, or trying to remember? The strange eye holes of the hood give it this weird, blank stare, like a ghost or a memory.