Tom Rankin is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, writer, editor, and folklorist. He has been documenting and interpreting American culture, particularly in the South, for nearly twenty years. His photographic work has been published and widely exhibited. His most long-standing work has been to reveal, through the documentary arts, the culture and society of the Mississippi Delta region, where he also served as a faculty member of Delta State University and the University of Mississippi.
Rankin is a professor of the Practice of Art and Documentary Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. He served as the Director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for three consecutive five-year terms until 2013. He is formerly Associate Professor of Art and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi and Chair of the Art Department at Delta State University. He is a graduate of Tufts University (B.A.), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (M.A.), and Georgia State University (M.F.A.).
His books include Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (1993), which received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Photography; Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre: Photographs of a River Life (1995); Faulkner's World: The Photographs of Martin J. Dain
(1997); and Local Heroes Changing America: Indivisible (2000). He recently edited and wrote the introductory essay for the book One Place: Paul Kwilecki andFour Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia (2013).
His photographs have been collected and published widely and included in numerous exhibitions. A native of Kentucky, he is a frequent writer and lecturer on photography, culture, and the documentary tradition. He is a co-editor of the Series on Documentary Arts and Culture with the University of North Carolina Press.
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