Jared
Ragland

WHAT HAS BEEN WILL BE AGAIN

Author and native Alabamian Rick Bragg has called Alabama the "crossroads of history." Indeed, the state has known a deep and complex past. From Native American genocide to slavery and secession, and from the fight for civil rights to the championing of Trumpist ideology, Alabama has stood at the nexus of American identity. In many ways, the state has also played a pivotal role in the history of photography. Photographs made in Alabama by Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Gordon Parks, and William Christenberry, among others, have documented poverty, labor, civil rights, and rural life and in turn formed a kind of backbone of American documentary storytelling.

Photographed during a time of pandemic and protest, economic uncertainty, and political polarization—and within the contexts of the photographers who have come before—"What Has Been Will Be Again" led me across more than 15,000 miles and 50 counties between fall 2020–spring 2021 to survey Alabama's cultural and physical landscape. By tracing historic colonial routes including the Old Federal Road and Hernando de Soto's 1540 expedition, the project bears witness to generational racial, ecological, and economic injustices embedded within a fraught landscape and reckons with both the troublesome past and tenuous present of the place I call home.