The Cruel Radiance of the Obvious: An article from Southern Cultures 17:2, The Photography Issue

by Tom Rankin

Overview

This introductory essay uses William Eggleston as the point of entry to preview the entire photography issue and includes striking photographs from Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Susan Harbage Page—as well as exploring the stunning work of Paul Kwilecki. "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. It is, we might say, about rebuilding our sight in the face of blindness, of recovering our collective vision." This article appears in the Summer 2011 issue of Southern Cultures: The Photography Issue.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807882429
Publisher:	UNC Center for the Study of the American South
Publication date:	06/01/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Tom Rankin has been documenting and interpreting American culture for nearly twenty years as photographer, filmmaker, and folklorist. He is Associate Professor of the Practice of Art and director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. 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).