JARED RAGLAND
'WHAT HAS BEEN WILL BE AGAIN'
Solo Exhibition
Artist Statement
American exceptionalism, that sense that we are somehow special and ordained as such, is a myth sedimented on Southern prosperity…. But even if you are a lover of the national romance, integrity requires that the stories be at least halfway honest. It is not enough to set aside a little time or attention here or there to grieve our national sins, then, soft as butter, turn back to proclamations of greatness. Because history is an instruction. And what you neglect to attend to from the past, you will surely ignore in the present.
– Imani Perry, South to America 1
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.
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.
What Has Been Will Be Again was initiated by a 2020 Do Good Fund fellowship and made with support from a 2020 Magnum Foundation U.S. Dispatches grant, 2021 Aftermath Project 1492/1619 American Aftermaths Grant, 2022 Columbus State University artist residency, 2025 Brooklyn Darkroom artist residency, 2025 Center for Photographic Art Mid-Career Artist Grant, and 2026 Foto Forum Santa Fe Photography Award. Additional support was provided by the Alabama State Council on the Arts, Coleman Center for the Arts, Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Wiregrass Museum of Art, Utah State University, and The University of Mississippi.
About The Artist
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 assignment 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.
During his tenure at the White House with the Bush (43) and Obama Administrations, Jared edited and designed photo books for the President, produced photographic exhibitions for the Leica Gallery New York, Leica Gallery Berlin, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and he was part of the editing team responsible for the release of the iconic photographs of President Obama in the Situation Room during the raid on Osama bin Laden.