Q&A with Tom Rankin

Tom Rankin is the director of the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts at Duke University. In April 2013, he published “One Place: Paul Kwilecki and Four Decades of Photographs from Decatur County, Georgia,” a compilation of photographs taken by Southern photographer Paul Kwilecki of his life in Georgia.

Rankin spoke to staff writer Ally Levine about the editing process and who Kwilecki is as an artist.

The Daily Tar Heel: Can you give me a brief description of “One Place”?

Tom Rankin: It’s a book about Decatur County, Ga., and in that, about the evolution of a Southern community over 40 years, and simultaneously it’s about the evolution and development of an artist, Paul Kwilecki, over that same amount of time.

DTH: Could you summarize your goals in editing the book?

TR: The first thing is that I believe that Paul Kwilecki is one of the most important photographers you have never heard of. One of the primary goals of the book is to introduce this remarkable photographic artist to a wider audience.

The second goal would be to really use the clarity of his vision of staying put and doing an in-depth look at one place. It is called “One Place” to show that in an age, particularly in the last 20 years, when nobody stays put and photographic attention span is all about moving to the next project and the next community, here is somebody who just stayed in his place.

And then finally to introduce his evolution as an artist and his self-taught evolution and all the sacrifices that that brings. I do not want the book to argue that everybody should stay put because it is kind of a bizarre and obsessive project he did, but on the other hand, it led to really remarkable stuff about a particular community that is also universal.

DTH: In your editing process, how did you work to keep the book true to Kwilecki’s personal story?

TR: The first thing I did was spend a lot of time with him going through the photographs that he had made on this large project. He had over 500 photographs that were in play. There is no way we were going to do a book of 500 photographs. The first thing I did was ask him, “What’s in and what’s out?” and get a sense of that. I didn’t want to publish anything that he wasn’t pleased with.

The other thing that I did was convince him that it should be sequenced loosely chronologically. If we were going to understand the evolution of a community and evolution of an artist, we needed to start early and move into the more recent past.

DTH: In the introduction to your book, you explain that he only took photos of the working class in his county and “that interest may well have been informed by his understanding of the documentary tradition in which countless photographers, filmmakers and ethnographers have sought to portray the power and poetry embedded within the everyday life of common people.” How did his understanding of the documentary process influence his work?

TR: That was part of what motivated him, and it also is part of what explains the things in his community that he pays the closest attention to. He paid the closest attention to the worlds of that county that were the most ignored, the most ordinary, the most humble. He is really attracted to the most ordinary of the ordinary because in it he sees extraordinary. He learned some of that from looking at the documentary tradition and reading. And then, he began to look around his own community and, in a way, discovered that he never needed to go anywhere else, that it was so endlessly fascinating. He liked to say that he photographed what interested him and he left everything else alone.

DTH: Is there anything else that you would like your readers and those who attend the lecture to know?

There is a show of his work up at the (Duke) Center for Documentary Studies now through Oct. (5). To see his original prints is a whole other experience because he was a fabulous printer.

Also, while this is a photography book, I encourage people to pay just as close of attention to his words and how they both inform the photographs, but also expand on what he has to say. I will read from some of his writings when I talk about it on Tuesday.

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