Jared Ragland
Jared Ragland (MFA, Tulane University) is a fine art and documentary photographer and former White House photo editor. He currently serves as Assistant Professor of Photography at Utah State University in Logan, Utah. His collaborative, socially conscious visual practice combines a range of photographic tactics with social science, historical, and literary research methodologies to critically confront issues of identity, marginalization, and the history of place.
Artist Statement
From Native American genocide to slavery and secession, and from the fight for civil rights to the championing of MAGA ideology, the national history written on, in, and by the people and landscapes of Alabama reveal problematic patterns at the nexus of our larger American identity. Working deep within a territory considered a repository of national repressions, What Has Been Will Be Again traces 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 to contend with Alabama’s fraught history and confront the white supremacist myths of American exceptionalism.
Social isolation is both a phrase and experience that defined the recent past, and What Has Been Will Be Again expressly evokes the alienation that has characterized the moment. Yet the work features sites for which isolation and violence is nothing new—places where extracted labor and environmental exploitation have exacted heavy tolls over 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 our collective frame of vision.
By combining a Southern Gothic visual sensibility with narrative captions, the photographs reflect upon the forced marginalization of African-Americans, Indigenous people, and members of the LGBTQ+ population, thereby challenging the silence of historical narratives that have long failed to speak the names, dates, and places where such violence has occurred.
Spring Hill, Barbour County, Alabama — Michael Farmer Fashions a Scarecrow in His Garden on Election Day, 2020
Release Date: September 27, 2024
Michael Farmer’s family has lived in Spring Hill for generations, where the predominantly Black community has faced a history of racial violence and voter disenfranchisement. On November 3, 1874 a white mob attacked the Spring Hill polling station, destroyed the ballot box, burned the ballots, and murdered the election supervisor’s son. When asked what he hoped might come from the 2020 presidential election, Farmer said, “I hope the young folks might think about what their ancestors came through to get where we are.”