Rising Stars: Meet Kate Medley

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kate Medley.

Hi Kate, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today. 
My name is Kate Medley, and I am a photojournalist in Durham, NC. I grew up in Mississippi, and my experiences in the rural deep South are central to my work. These days, I cover regional and national news for clients such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR. 

I went to college at the University of Montana, where I got a bachelor’s degree in photojournalism, and my first newspaper job was shooting for the weekly paper in Missoula. By way of daily newspaper work (shout-outs to The Charlotte Observer, The Chattanooga Times Free Press, and The Jackson (MS) Free Press), I made my way back to the South, and documenting this region has become my life’s work. 

After getting a Master’s degree in Southern Studies from the University of Mississippi, I focused my work primarily on studying the culture of food and spent ten years pioneering the documentary storytelling program at Whole Foods Market. This job took me all over the world, making films and photographs about the people, places, and processes behind the store’s meat, seafood, and produce. 

In recent years, since having children, I have felt fortunate to return full-time to journalism work, telling the day-to-day stories that affect our immediate communities closer to home here in North Carolina. 

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
This year I will publish my first book! It is the culmination of a long-term project documenting gas station food and culture. I started this project ten years ago, exploring the diversity of gas station food in North Carolina – who was serving the best samosas, scratch biscuits, fresh pounded tortillas. In subsequent years, as my travels have taken me down rural roads throughout the South, I have come to see these gas stations as a signpost in a strange land. They compel me to wonder: Who lives here? What do they do for work? What do they eat? What do they believe? What is the pace of the day? What is important in their America? Their South? As I work to bring this project to book form, I have expanded the project narrative to tell a wider story about what these foods and common spaces tell us about our changing South. The book of photographs will be published by Bitter Southerner Publishing this fall and will be available for pre-order soon! 

Contact Info:

• Website: katemedley.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/katemedley/

Image Credits
Kate Medley