Knoxville native Reed Massengill graduated from UT in 1984 with a bachelor’s in journalism. The nephew of Byron De La Beckwith, convicted (in his third trial) of killing civil rights leader Medgar Evers, Massengill’s first book, Portrait of a Racist: The Man Who Killed Medgar Evers? (St. Martin’s Press) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and garnered considerable acclaim. He is today a writer and photographer who divides his time between Knoxville and New York. His articles and photography have appeared in the New York Times, Interview, Connoisseur, Art & Understanding, Forbes, Genre, Essence, Swim, and Paramour, among others. As vice president of the Media Solutions Group of American Express (1994–2002), he authored Becoming American Express: 150 Years of Reinvention and Customer Service, which won the 2000 Arline Custer Memorial Award from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference.
He achieved a measure of success as a photographer and writer about male nudes and the history of the portrayal of the male nude. His first photographic book, Massengill, was published in 1996 and followed in 1997 by Massengill Men. In 2007 he published Backstage Pass: The Men of Broadway Bares, and in 2009 he published Uncovered: Rare Vintage Male Nudes, in which he presented a photographic collection and traced the history of the treatment of photographs of male nudes by mainstream culture.