Jared
Ragland

WHAT HAS BEEN WILL BE AGAIN

Alabama has known a deep and complex history. From Native American genocide to slavery and secession, and from the fight for civil rights to the championing of MAGA ideologies, the state has stood at the nexus of American identity. Now, in a tumultuous moment of pandemic, protest, and political polarization, What Has Been Will Be Again has led me across more than 35,000 miles and into each of my home state's 67 counties to trace routes connected to brutal colonial legacies—including the path of Hernando de Soto's 1540 expedition, the Trail of Tears, and the Old Federal Road.

Social isolation is both a phrase and experience that has defined the recent past, and What Has Been Will Be Again expressly evokes the alienation that has characterized the moment. Yet the work considers sites for which isolation is nothing new—places where racial violence, extracted labor, and environmental exploitation have exacted heavy tolls for generations. Such isolation is less accidental or temporal, and more a product of decades of willful neglect by a mainstream America only now starting to visualize what—and who—has been pushed out of the collective frame of vision.

By combining a Southern Gothic visual sensibility with narrative captions, the photographs strategically focus on the importance of place, the passage of time, and the visual-political dimensions of remembrance to confront White supremacist myths of American exceptionalism and challenge the silence of historical narratives that have failed to speak the names, dates, and places where prolonged violence and marginalization has occurred.