Photographs from Kunshan by Tom Rankin
Propitious Wind and Rain features photographs made by Tom Rankin in and around Kunshan, China in the Fall of 2016. While in Kunshan Rankin taught documentary film, participated in campus life, and explored Kunshan via tricycle with his 8x10 view camera in tow. Rankin focused on photographing “the social and cultural landscape” surrounding the new Duke Kunshan University campus, particularly, “the ways in which culture, business, and daily life are perpetually in negotiation with land and water.”
A photographer, filmmaker, and folklorist, Tom Rankin has been documenting and interpreting American culture for nearly twenty years. 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 is a Professor of the Practice in the Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies and Director of the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke.
Artist Talk & Reception: January 31, 2019, 5:00-7:00 p.m.
This exhibition was sponsored in part by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.
