Solo Exhibition: Opening June 5th, 2026

Jared Ragland (MFA, Tulane University) is a fine art and documentary photographer and former White House photo editor. 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. He currently serves on the  faculty at the University of Mississippi as Instructional Assistant Professor in the Department of Art  and Art History and affiliate faculty at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.

Jared is the photo editor of National Geographic Books’ The President’s Photographer: Fifty Years Inside  the Oval Office, and he has worked on assignments for NGOs in the Balkans, the former Soviet Bloc,  East Africa, and Haiti. Jared’s work has been exhibited around the world in more than 100 solo and  group exhibitions, and his photographs have been featured by The New Yorker, New York Times, The  Washington Post, Vanity Fair Italia, and The Oxford American. His visual ethnographic research has been  published in more than two dozen social science textbooks and high-impact journals, including  the first photographs to ever be published in the flagship social sciences journal, Criminology. In  2015, Jared was named one of TIME Magazine’s “Instagram Photographers to Follow in All 50  States.” He is a 2020 Magnum Foundation grantee, 2020-21 Do Good Fund Artist-in-Residence,  2022 Aftermath Project Finalist, 2025 Brooklyn Darkroom Artist-in-Residence, 2025 Center for  Photographic Art Mid-Career grantee, and winner of the 2026 Foto Forum Santa Fe Photography  Award. His first film, Some Million Miles, (co-directed with Adam Forrester) has screened in festivals  around the world and was distributed nationally by PBS. A forthcoming monograph co-authored  with Sara J. Winston will be published by Oregon State University’s Composit Press in 2026. 

Artist Statement

WHAT HAS BEEN WILL BE AGAIN

Alabama has known a deep and complex history. From Indigenous 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 larger American identity. Working deep in territory considered a repository of national  repressions, What Has Been Will Be Again has led Jared Ragland across more than 35,000 miles and  into each of Alabama’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.  

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​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 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 and challenge the silence of historical narratives that have  so long failed to speak the names, dates, and places where such violence and marginalization has  occurred.