Rankin, Thomas Donald

Tom Rankin served as the Director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for three consecutive five-year terms until 2013, and is a Professor of the Practice in the Arts at Duke University. 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 has also served as a faculty member of Delta State University and the University of Mississippi. He has returned many times since the 1980s to photograph the landscapes and people of the Mississippi Delta, most recently in 2011 after the great floods of that year. 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 received an MFA from Georgia State University and an MA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. American Photo Magazine named Tom Rankin as one of the 100 Most Important People in Photography, May, 2005.