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Tom Rankin is a documentary photographer, filmmaker, folklorist, professor of art and documentary studies, and former director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Collection consists of 147 black-and-white and color photographs documenting the American South and China. Photographs from the South focus on religious sites, rituals, and communities in the Mississippi Delta region, as well as portraits of individuals, including portraits of Mississippi writer Larry Brown, and Southern landscapes. An additional documentary project from 2016 took Rankin to China, where he photographed semi-rural landscapes, often taken with high-rise buildings in the far distance or adjacent to industrial structures, as well as bridges and rivers, markets and live fish vendors, and a few street scenes. Finished prints range from 8x11 inch contact prints to 11x14, 16x20, and 20x24 large-format prints. Supporting materials include manuscripts, publications files, and two films, all deriving from Rankin's career and art practice. Includes a digital audio recording of a talk by Rankin at the exhibit opening of his work, "Near the Cross: Photographs from the Mississippi Delta." Acquired as part of the Archive of Documentary Arts at Duke University.

Henry Coullaud (1872-1954) was a French military physician. The two albums contain 120 black-and-white photographs taken by Coullaud during the Boxer Rebellion in China, 1900-1901. Album 1 starts with images of the French naval personnel with whom he travelled, French ships, and the allied fleets, along with scenes taken in the ports of Djibouti, Port Said, Singapore, and Taku (Dagu). The rest of the images offer views of the cities of Tianjin, Baodingfu, Dingzhou, and Zhengdingfu. There are images of many types of buildings, markets and merchants, river life, modes of transportation, entertainments, a public execution, and images of rural life and work. There are a number of group portraits of Chinese and French officials and wealthy Chinese men, as well as a group portrait in a French medical clinic, and officers putting on a theatrical play and celebrating July 14th. There are also some photographs of urban and rural Chinese women. The albums seem to have been a gift from a Chinese family to Coullaud, whose last name, spelled phonetically in Chinese characters, appears on the album covers.

The South Asian Pamphlets Collection spans the years 1920-2005, with the bulk of the material dating from the 1950s to the 1990s, and with only a few items from the 1910s-1940s. It is arranged by country. Topics commonly covered in each country series include but are not limited to agriculture, arts, defense, economic development, education, ethnic or cultural conflict, industry and commerce, international relations, politics and government, population issues, religion and philosophy, rural development, tourism, and the status of women. While the majority of the pamphlets were published by organizations and agencies and do not list individual authors' names, there are also pamphlets with individual authors listed.