Born in 1936 in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, William Christenberry is recognized as an artist, photographer, teacher and arts advocate. Greatly influenced by Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walker Evans and James Agee's 1936 masterpiece on life in the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression, Christenberry has spent the last 30 years making pictures in and around Hale County, Alabama, documenting rural southern landscapes and the worn, remote margins of small-town life. He has lived and worked in Washington, D.C., since 1968, where he is a professor at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. His work can be found in the collections of, among others, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and The Museum of Modern Art.

Working from Memory is a collection of stories by the renowned photographer, painter and sculptor William Christenberry. Based on conversations with author and critic Susanne Lange, these stories elaborate the artist's memories of the Deep South, in whose rich literary tradition they are steeped. In a lyrical but lucid prose, they set personal experience against the backdrop of important political and cultural moments in the southern states, endowing that landscape with a vividness that will be familiar to fans of the artist's photography. Christenberry's own photographs accompany these tales.