The Documentary Moment and the Revelation at Hand
tom rankin
“The photographer is also in a perpetual
battle to see beyond and around what
he or she has already seen, to bring to
their own work a “sovereign vision,” to
borrow Walker Percy’s words, that is
not obvious or redundant or derivative.”
Online Artist Talk w/ Tom Rankin
Recorded Tuesday, April 21st, 2020
Southern Cultures is offering their Spring Journal The Documentary Moment to the Six Feet photography community with a special free-shipping discount. Click the journal below to order your copy.
Forum Description: For our first session, we welcomed the photographer, filmmaker, and folklorist, Tom Rankin. Through his photography practice and extensive writing and lecturing on photography, Tom has explored and shined a light on the power of the medium to document, comment, engage, act, and, most importantly, reveal. For Tom, “photography in its finest and most decisive moments is about those tired or ignored or unseen parts of our lives, the mundane and worn paths that sit before us so firmly that we cease to notice.” As we shelter in place, perhaps Tom can “help us see beyond and around” to the real revelation at hand.
Artist Bio: Tom Rankin is a celebrated and published documentary photographer and Professor of the Practice of Art and Documentary Studies at Duke University, where he directs the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts. For 15 years, Tom was the director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. Tom Rankin’s 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). Tom is also the general editor of the Series on Documentary Arts and Culture with the University of North Carolina Press.
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