[2] After returning to the United States following these sojourns, Ranard attended the University of New Mexico, but his college life was interrupted when it was discovered he had Hodgkin's disease.
[3] Ranard overcame this, but it was during his treatment with blood transfusions that his doctors later believed he had contracted Hepatitis C, which dogged him for the rest of his life and finally killed him.
His entry into professional boxing was empowered through a close association with the Louisville boxer Greg Page, who was managed by Don King in the early part of his career, and who was a heavyweight champion for five months in 1984–1985.
While Ranard photographed battles in the ring, the greater part of this portfolio is given over to capturing the background events of the sport which suggested its explosiveness.
[6] She also noticed an occasional gentleness in the portfolio, citing the photograph "Purcell Davis (1979)", of a fighter disrobing at weigh-in, a jersey covering his head so that only the contour of his body showed, which recalled to her the contrapposto technique in Michelangelo's David.
This explains why Hollywood can't approach the horror of Viet Nam that the news photographs taken in the streets and jungle suggest.
[8]Oates subsequently expanded on her essay and portions of The Brutal Aesthetic appeared aside her text in the book On Boxing, published in 1987 and now (2017) a Harper Perennial.
In 1986, the year before the publication of On Boxing, Ranard's Brutal Aesthetic portfolio won a Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Fellowship.
"[3] In the mid-1980s, Ranard moved to New York City's East Village and periodically photographed the street life of his neighborhood, squatter rights turmoil, and the Tompkins Square Park protests.
HIV/AIDS scholars have remarked of the "stoicism" with which Ranard photographed drug users in Russia, with elements of compassion, maintaining their dignity and representing them as human.
At the time of his death, Ranard was in possession of four mock-up books of his life's work which he was attempting to publish in a media form that might be widely disseminated: The Brutal Aesthetic (which had never been published in entirety), Lost Heroes (about life in Russia during the fall of the Empire), The Prisoners (about Russian prisons), and On Every Corner (about race relations between blacks and whites in Louisville and the city's African-American store-front churches).
The Cressman Center said of its memorial show of Ranard's work in 2009, it is "most impressive in its breadth, consistency, and emotive impact" and that his photographs 'transcend journalism and become an exquisite representation and expression of shared humanity.
His social photographic work is pure art; but it also showed us the harsh reality and illustrated in a brilliant and compassionate way the urgent need to respond.