Christenberry was born and grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, but he spent the summers nearby in Hale County, where his grandparents lived on land that had been in the family for generations. He lived much of his adult life in Washington, DC, and made annual pilgrimages each summer to Alabama to visit his family and photograph his childhood haunts. Christenberry took this picture of his paternal grandparents’ home, long since abandoned and reclaimed by the verdant landscape, with unsentimental directness.