Kenneth D. Tunnell

Ken Tunnell was born and raised in East Tennessee. After earning his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Tennessee, Tunnell spent the next three decades at Eastern Kentucky University. During his tenure there he published regularly in the academic disciplines of sociology and criminology including five books based on field research. His first book, "Choosing Crime," is based on interview research with career armed robbers and burglars. "Pissing on Demand" tells the story of how drug testing came to pervade contemporary life and of efforts to subvert testing measures. After studying photography, darkroom printing and post-processing, Tunnell published his first photography book – "Once Upon a Place: The Fading of Community in Rural Kentucky" (2011) and in 2019 published his second, "Seeing the Unseen." Photography and writing about the photographic experience were at that time relatively new passions for Tunnell. During 2019, Tunnell began chronicling events in prose and photographs and, in the age-old journal-keeping tradition, published "Close to Home" (2020). That book was followed by journal-keeping manuscripts made during 2020 and 2021 resulting in the published books, "A Pandemic Year" and "Keeping Watch." "Life During Covid" (2021) is his book of photographs made during the Covid-19 pandemic. Each of these books is available from Amazon. Tunnell now makes his home in Knoxville, Tennessee.