B. BIRMINGHAM, AL, 1987; LIVES IN LOGAN, UT
Photographer Jared Ragland’s extended documentary project “What Has Been Will Be Again” (2020–21) explores the racial injustice, polarization, and economic isolation of an impoverished and isolated part of America. Raised as a Southern Baptist in rural Alabama, Ragland traversed more than fifteen thousand miles in fifty counties of his home state to record economic and ecological injustice, the enduring legacy of systemic racism, and the perpetuation of traditional white values.
Incorporating reportage and historical research, Ragland—a former White House photo editor who has worked on assignments for NGOs in the Balkans, former Soviet Bloc, East Africa, and Haiti— confronts the national scars of slavery, Native American genocide, and the struggle for civil rights through his visual practice. His photographs record and interrogate what he calls the “Trumpist ideology,” a tenacious and often bitter view of social change that plays a divisive role in the rural South. Ragland reveals painful truths about marginalization and American national identity through a personal exploration of untold histories and entrenched intergenerational violence. His haunted interiors, portraits, and landscapes bear the cicatrices of past trauma, pointing to a tenuous present and the fraught daily struggle to survive in geographically isolated enclaves of the United States.
This installation is part of the exhibition Parallel Lives: Photography, Identity, and Belonging, curated by Maya Benton. Parallel Lives draws attention to complex notions of community and belonging, and in particular how our social and familial relationships have been reimagined as a result of the conditions of isolation and uncertainty imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Photo: Jared Ragland, Irondale, Jefferson County, Ala. Blake, 2020