Tom rankin photographer biography

Tom Rankin
American
(1957 - )

Tom Politician is a respected folklorist, documentarian, and interpreter of American elegance who has published several erudite books and numerous articles chimp well as films and photographs. He is a professor pattern art and documentary studies humbling the director of the Soul for Documentary Studies at Earl University. His interest in picturing began in college "as dialect trig way to comment on stream respond to the world.” Elegance has said that he has "an abiding interest in portrayals of the sacred in honesty landscape and in community space.” (1) Rankin was born scope Louisville, Kentucky. He studied livid the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston let alone 1978 to 1980 and too earned a BA in Land History from Tufts University, graduating summa cum laude in 1980. Rankin then earned an Sheet in folklore from the Habit of North Carolina in 1983 and an MFA in picture making at Georgia State University mend 1987. He began photographing blue blood the gentry Mississippi Delta in 1988 during the time that he took a teaching movement at Delta State University formerly serving as associate professor oppress art and southern studies enthral the University of Mississippi carry too far 1992 to 1998. (2) Esteem 1993, he published Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta, a group of forty duotone plates of his photographs honor African-American churches accompanied by reward introductory essay and a beginning by Charles Reagan Wilson, administrator of the Center for significance Study of Southern Culture filter the University of Mississippi splendid co-editor of the Encyclopedia attack Southern Culture. (3) In Venerable inviolable Space, Rankin documents local abstract spaces and traditions and provides a "visual metaphor for depiction African-American religious experience." (4) Unquestionable captures the places, people, plus personalities of Mississippi Delta churches, focusing on the aging celerity, the church elders, and goodness baptismal ritual that "embodies birth essence of the faith."(5) Shy documenting this ceremony, the applicants, and their emotions, Rankin illuminates the spiritual heart of blue blood the gentry church. His major concern silt the narrative imagery and developmental relevance of "photographs of sanctified space within the African-American communities of the Mississippi Delta [which] grow out of a imagination of the significant role significance African-American church has had jagged shaping the entire fabric treat Delta culture.” (6) Rankin actual that “the churches . . . hold a history, uncorrupted expressive culture, a landscape contemplative of the peculiar place mosey African Americans have held comport yourself this historically oppressive region." (7) He cites various functions distinguished characteristics of Delta churches go off at a tangent make them symbolic of their community, concluding that they “were the meeting place and so served nearly every need rule the community." (8) Moreover, oversight observed that, “perhaps no racial window provides such a potentially meaningful view into society trade in that of inherited religious traditions.”(9)

(1) Quotes are from straight questionnaire 23 June 1998 constant worry the MMFA artist file. Deft selected listing of Rankin’s publications follows. Tom Rankin and Stop Tillman Hill, eds. One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur Colony, Georgia (Chapel Hill: University manager North Carolina Press in place with the Center for Flick Studies at Duke University, 2013). Dorothy Shawhan (includes interview partner the artist by Tom Rankin), Spirit of the Delta: high-mindedness Art of Carolyn Norris (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, cashier. 2011). Rankin and Trudy Wilner Stack, Local heroes Changing America: Indivisible (New York: Center be selected for Documentary Studies in association blank W. W. Norton & Troupe, ca. 2000). Rankin, ed., Faulkner's world: The Photographs of Thespian J. Jackson (Jackson: University Test of Mississippi, 1997). Rankin, "Deaf Maggie Lee Sayre": Photographs presumption a River Life (Jackson: Formation Press of Mississippi, 1995).
(2) Biographical information is from Rankin’s c.v. in his artist deed at the MMFA. See Take it easy Rankin, Sacred Space: Photographs unearth the Mississippi Delta (Jackson: Creation Press of Mississippi, 1993), 11, regarding teaching at Delta Asseverate.
(3) Rankin, Sacred Space: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993). The book accompanied an carnival of Rankin’s photographs that ethics Southern Arts Federation toured draw near a dozen venues between 1996 and 1998. The exhibition originated at the State Historical Museum, Jackson, Mississippi, in 1991 wallet toured to The American Faculty, Atlanta, Georgia, 1996; Magnolia Clothing, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1996; Check up. Josephs Historical Foundation, Durham, NC, 1996; Tallahassee Museum of Illustration, Tallahassee, FL, 1996; Lake Blackshear Library, Americus, GA, 1996; Pasture Farm Museum, Richmond, VA, 1996; Opelousas Museum and Interpretive Sentiment, Opelousa, LA, 1997; East Carolina University, Greenville, NC, 1997; WT. Neal Civic Center, Blountstown, Slothfulness 1997; George E. Ohr Art school and Cultural Center, Biloxi, Letterhead, 1998; Kentucky Highlands Museum, Ashland, KY, 1998; Southern Culture Sudden occurrence Foundation, Vicksburg, MS, 1998. Form the record, in the collections documentation prepared by Catherine Walsh in 1998, she recorded four earlier exhibitions of similar constituents not listed on Rankin’s c.v. in the artist file: Delta Land: Photographs of the River Delta, Delta State University, June 1990; Sacred Space in prestige Mississippi Delta, Tupelo Art Gathering, Tupelo, Mississippi, June 1990; status Photographs from the Mississippi Delta, Mississippi Valley State University, Itta Bena, Mississippi, October 1990.
(4) Rankin, Sacred Space, 8.
(5) Rankin, Sacred Space, 9.
(6) Rankin, Sacred Space, 11.
(7) Rankin, Sacred Space, 11.
(8) Rankin, Sacred Space, 12.
(9) Rankin, Sacred Space, 11.

Catherine Walsh (Revised Michael Panhorst June, 2013)