[1][2][3] His father, Vinton Birney Imes, Jr., owned the town newspaper, The Commercial Dispatch.
[3] He attended desegregated public schools in Columbus and graduated from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville with a Bachelor of Arts degree in History in 1973.
[1] Drawing inspiration from the photographs of other Southern artists like Eudora Welty and William Eggleston, his work concentrates on the American South, especially blacks in the Mississippi Delta.
[1][8] In 1991 University Press of Mississippi published "Juke Joint," the first of Imes' three books.
That same year Smithsonian Press published a collection of his black and white work, "Partial to Home.