Jared Ragland
Jared Ragland
From Native American genocide to slavery and secession, and from the fight for civil rights to the championing of Trumpist ideology, Alabama has stood at the nexus of American identity. In many ways, the state has also played a pivotal role in the history of photography. Photographs made in Alabama by Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Gordon Parks, and William Christenberry, among others, have documented poverty, labor, civil rights, and rural life and in turn formed a kind of backbone of American documentary storytelling.
Now in a time of pandemic and protest, economic uncertainty, and political polarization—and within the contexts of the photographers who have come before—What Has Been Will Be Again has led me across more than 15,000 miles and 50 counties to survey Alabama’s cultural and physical landscape. By tracing historic colonial routes including the Old Federal Road and Hernando de Soto’s 1540 expedition, the project bears witness to generational racial, ecological, and economic injustice, reckoning my home state’s trouble-some past and tenuous present.
– Jared Ragland
Spring Hill, Barbour County, Ala. Michael Farmer, 57, fashions a scarecrow next to his garden on Election Day. 2020.
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, destroying the ballot box, burning the ballots, and murdering the election supervisor’s son. Farmer is a lifelong Democrat and military veteran who served two tours overseas in Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. 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.”
Tallassee, Elmore County, Ala. Ruins of Tallassee Mills, a Civil War–era armory and textile mill. 2020.
Dallas County, Ala. Perine Well at Old Cahawba. 2020.
The area now known as Old Cahawba was first occupied by large populations of Paleoindians; then from 1000-1500 CE the Mississippian period brought agriculture and mound builders. Spanish conquistadors were welcomed to a walled city with palisades, yet the Afro-Eurasian diseases the explorers brought with them killed thousands of indigenous people in the 16th and 17th centuries. The remaining native peoples were killed or forced to move by an even greater influx of Europeans. By the early nineteenth century, the dirt from the ancient mounds at Cahawba was used to build railroad beds, and the town briefly served as the state capital of Alabama. At the time it was dug in the 1850s, the Perine Well, at seven hundred to nine hundred feet deep, was the second-largest known well in the world, feeding cool water through a system of pipes to “air condition” a twenty-six-room brick mansion. Cahawba became a ghost town shortly after the Civil War, largely due to recurring floods. By the late 1800s, the town site was purchased for $500 and its buildings demolished.
Catherine Wilkins, Ph.D.
Social isolation is both a phrase and an experience that has defined the past year in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic. The images in photographer Jared Ragland’s ongoing body of work, What Has Been Will Be Again, expressly evoke the loneliness that has characterized this period; solitary subjects inhabit these frames, and many images in the series are devoid of people altogether. One can imagine the photographer, alone, navigating deserted landscapes with only a camera as his companion, documenting the recent ravaging of the public sphere. Yet, while the theme is certainly au courant, What Has Been… features subjects for whom social isolation is nothing new. This body of photographs, instead, makes a case for a long history of isolation and alienation in the artist’s home state – one that has exacted a costly human toll.
In this photographic survey that began in Fall 2020, Ragland has been working his way across Alabama following historical routes from America’s colonial era, documenting individuals and communities whose existence has been practically defined by economic and geographic isolation. The series features landscapes shot in tiny rural towns plagued by generational poverty and the exploitation of the environment, as evidenced by dispossessed storefronts, homes, and infrastructure. Ragland also makes visible the often-overlooked inhabitants of these neglected places by producing powerful portraits of lone individuals. While we can provide little assistance or solace Ragland seems to insist that the simple act of bearing witness to the loneliness is important. As the viewer travels alongside the photographer, moving through his weeks on the road and simultaneously through deep time, a creeping realization sets in – that these subjects and spaces have been deliberately left to their own devices, to deteriorate or decay. Their isolation seems 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.
The great paradox of What Has Been… is that it visualizes the very real social isolation that has had tangible consequences on the individuals and communities photographed, while simultaneously revealing connections across space, place, people, and time. In images subtly subversive to the overall aesthetic of loneliness, tree branches organically entwine, messages are exchanged via layers of marks on the landscape, power lines run alongside roads that stretch out toward the horizon. More overtly, by tying together events in Alabama’s centuries-long past with present-day issues, Ragland insists that it is impossible to view our current period outside of history. The confluence of the COVID-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter movement, and seditious domestic terrorism marks our times as significant, but Ragland’s body of work shows that the isolation, socioeconomic inequalities, racism, and marginalization we’ve witnessed is not unprecedented. What Has Been… speaks specifically to the mood of our moment while also asserting the timelessness of its themes of isolation by illustrating the perpetuated use of segregation and sequestration in service of the white supremacist myths of American individualism and exceptionalism. As viewers prepare to emerge from quarantine and rejoin “post-pandemic” society, Ragland asks us to bear witness to the people and places who cannot so easily shrug off the mantle of social isolation.
Hayneville, Lowndes County, Ala. Beside the former location of Cash’s Store, where in 1965 Civil Rights activist and seminarian Jonathan Myrick Daniels was shot to death by Tom Coleman. 2020.
Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian from Keene, NH, had come to Alabama after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for clergy to join the march from Selma to Montgomery. Daniels remained in Alabama after the march, assisting with voter registration efforts, serving at a health clinic, and helping integrate an Episcopal congregation. Daniels and three other activists were later targeted by Tom Coleman, a volunteer special deputy sheriff, who gunned down the civil-rights organizers. Coleman was charged with manslaughter in Daniels’s death; an all-white jury acquitted him of all charges after deliberating for less than two hours.
Childersburg, Talladega County, Ala. Sunshine turns soil in the Commons Community Workshop garden. 2020.
As a response to national division and the COVID-19 outbreak, Sunshine and her husband Rusty bought a home in downtown Childersburg and created The Commons Community Workshop. Through their Fearless Communities Initiative they have built a community garden in a donated downtown lot, host trade days, and foster relationships with their neighbors as a means of “celebrating solidarity and strength.” The couple invited me to find them on Facebook where Sunshine posts Initiative announcements, vocalizes her opposition to vaccines, and shares her beliefs about global child sex trafficking networks, the threat of Marxism, and the coming of the end times.
Eclectic, Elmore County, Ala. 2020.
Eclectic, Elmore County, Ala. Robert. 2020.
Birmingham, Jefferson County, Ala. Tuxedo Junction, Ensley neighborhood. 2020.
Tuscaloosa, Tuscaloosa County, Ala. Glitter scattered on ruins of the former Alabama state capitol building. 2020.
Yoholo-Micco, chieftain of the Upper Creek town of Eufaula, is said to have addressed the Alabama Legislature in 1836 at the state capital in Tuscaloosa before departing the ancestral Muscogee homelands on the Trail of Tears. Yoholo-Micco’s actual words are unknown, but white, colonial writers of history have painted the Creek leader as one who accepted indigenous removal with an air of romantic resignation, going so far as to contrive his final words in a way to whitewash the genocide that had taken place over 300+ years’ time. Yoholo-Micco’s apocryphal address – which has been reproduced in Alabama history books and grade school curriculum for decades – reads, in part: “I come here, brothers, to see the great house of Alabama and the men who make laws and say farewell in brotherly kindness before I go to the far west, where my people are now going. In time gone by I have thought that the white men wanted to bring burden and ache of heart among my people in driving them from their homes and yoking them with laws they do not understand. But I have now become satisfied that they are not unfriendly toward us, but that they wish us well.”
Sumter County, Ala. Tin man. 2021.
In 1978, a subsidiary of Waste Management Inc. purchased a landfill permit for a 300-acre tract of land in a Sumter County community where 90% of residents are Black. Since then, the company has expanded the site to 2,700 acres, creating the largest hazardous waste landfill in the United States. The landfill also sits directly over the Eutaw Aquifer, which supplies water to a large part of Alabama. Nearly 40% of the toxic waste disposed of nationwide between 1984-87 under the federal Superfund removal program ended up at the landfill. One of its original owners, James Parsons, is the son-in-law of former governor George Wallace. The political connections enabled the company to obtain the necessary permits from the Health Department to operate the dump.
Birmingham, Jefferson County, Ala. Mural depicting the murder of George Floyd, Ensley neighborhood. 2020.
According to a 2020 investigation by Northeastern University, 123 Black people were killed by white police officers in Jefferson County between 1932–1968. In only two cases were officers charged for the killings. For 26 of the 36 years chronicled, the commissioner of public safety in Birmingham was Eugene “Bull” Connor, who infamously turned fire hoses and attack dogs on civil rights protesters in Birmingham in 1963.
Sumter County, Ala. Near the site of Fort Tombecbe, an 18th cen. stockade built on Choctaw lands. 2021.
Originally constructed by French colonialists in 1736 on the border of French Louisiana, Fort Tombecbe was positioned to hold back British intrusion into the area and served as a major French outpost and trade depot among the Choctaw. Control passed to the British in 1763, who renamed it Fort York but abandoned the site. In 1793 Spain acquired the site from the Choctaw in the treaty of Boufouka, which ceded approximately 10,000 acres of Choctaw land to the Spanish.
Talladega County, Ala. Ruins of Mt. Ida Plantation. 2020.
Destroyed by fire in 1956, the 1840 Greek Revival-style antebellum mansion was built for Walker Reynolds, who owned some 13,000 acres of land and several hundred enslaved persons. The plantation–located near the site of Abihka, once one of four mother towns of the Muscogee Creek confederacy–was reportedly a location for the 1915 white-supremacist film, Birth of a Nation.
Reform, Pickens County, Ala. Broken column. 2020.
Carrollton, Pickens County, Ala. Civil War Monument. 2020.
Phenix City, Russell County, Ala. Mike. 2021.
Located on the Chattahoochee River near the former Creek centers of Coweta and Yuchi Town, Phenix City has known a violent and fraught history. In the mid 20th cen., it was home to the Dixie Mafia, and as murders, prostitution, and gambling ran rampant the town became known as “the wickedest city in the United States.”
Jacksonville, Calhoun County, Ala. Taxidermy tableaux with Confederate battle flag. 2020.
Irondale, Jefferson County, Ala. Evangelist. 2020.
Fort Deposit, Lowndes County, Ala. Ben. 2021.
Uniontown, Perry County, Ala. 2020.
Uniontown is home to around 2,000 people, 91% of whom are Black. The average annual household income is just over $30,000, and 51% live in poverty. The city faces a multitude of environmental issues that affect the health and lives of its residents. At the time of a 2017 report by the Alabama State Nurses Association, Uniontown had only one doctor’s office and no public transportation system, with the nearest hospitals located more than 30 miles away.
Uniontown, Perry County, Ala. 2020.
In 2009, the TVA Kingston Fossil Plant coal ash dike ruptured and released 5.4 million cubic yards of coal ash into the Emory River in Tennessee. As part of the clean-up process the Arrowhead landfill in Uniontown received the spilled coal ash, taking on more than 4 million tons of coal ash between July 2009 and December 2010. The landfill is located less than 5 miles from Uniontown, and the nearest residence is approximately 300 feet away from the site.
Evergreen, Conecuh County, Ala. 2021.
Wylam, Jefferson County, Ala. 2020.
Demopolis, Marengo County, Ala. 2020.
Repton, Conecuh County, Ala. Dinosaur Adventure Land. 2021.
Dinosaur Adventure Land is a Christian campground, science center, and adventure park dedicated to anti-evolution teaching. Its founder and leader, Christian fundamentalist Kent E. Hovind, takes a literalist interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative and promotes discredited Young Earth Creationist theories. Before building DAL in Alabama, Hovind operated a similar theme park in Pensacola and served a ten-year sentence in federal prison for failure to pay taxes, obstructing federal agents, and structuring cash transactions.
Evergreen, Conecuh County, Ala. Antoine. 2021.
Salem, Lee County, Ala. Mural glorifying enslaved labor. 2021.
Monroe County, Ala. Along a spur of the Old Federal Road, near the site of Claiborne. 2021.
Located along the Alabama River in present-day Monroe County, Claiborne was a once flourishing center of political and economic life in territorial Alabama. Serving as a base of operations during the Creek War in the early 19th century, Claiborne was also home to Alabama’s first Eli Whitney-designed cotton gin. Today, the Georgia-Pacific Alabama River Cellulose paper mill is located just upriver of the old town site. The mill produces specialty fluff and market pulp for consumer products that are found in more than 65% of U.S. households. While in process of switching to sustainable and renewable energy sources and investing in conservation projects, Georgia-Pacific self-reported that the Alabama River Cellulose paper mill released more than 120,000 pounds of reproductive toxins into the Alabama River in 2015.
York, Sumter County, Ala. 2021.
Sumter County, Ala. 2021.
Legend has it that sometime around 1868, a handsome man rode into the Sumter County seat of Livingston on a white horse. Immediately charming the townspeople, Stephen Renfroe would rise to prominence as a leading figure among disgruntled whites against their “carpetbagging Yankee oppressors.” As Sumter County Sheriff and leader of the local Ku Klux Klan, Renfroe was known more for breaking the law than keeping it—orchestrating the kidnappings and murders of several local Republicans, committing arson, and embezzling money. In 1880, he was charged with assault with intent to murder and other crimes, but was acquitted. Following several more arrests, escapes from jail, and living as an outlaw and drifter for years, Renfroe returned to Sumter County, where he threatened to blackmail his former Klan associates. A mob formed in response, seizing Renfroe and marching him to the banks of the Sucarnoochee River, where they hanged him from a chinaberry tree.
Brookside, Jefferson County, Ala. Toby. 2020.
Sayre, Jefferson County, Ala. Cassie. 2020.
Blues Old Stand, Bullock County, Ala. Three Notch Road. 2021.
Built by U.S. Army engineers in 1824, Three Notch Road was constructed to facilitate U.S. military communication between Fort Mitchell in southeast Alabama and Pensacola, Fla. The 233-mile path was originally designated as Road No. 6 but became colloquially known as Three Notch Road for the distinctive horizontal notches blazed into trees by advancing surveyors as they marked the route for the builders who followed. The road which was wide enough to allow “carriages, carts, wagons, &c.” and was the major thoroughfare for those coming from Georgia as east Alabama was opened to settlement following the forced removal of Indigenous people.
Geneva County, Ala. 2021.
Jackson County, Ala. Russel Cave. 2020.
Initially formed as caverns and tunnels by underground streams, Russell Cave became habitable 9,000-11,000 years ago and contains one of the most complete archeological records of prehistoric cultures discovered in North America. Smithsonian Institution archeologists have dug more than 30 feet below the cave’s present floor, uncovering tools, weapons, pottery, campfire hearths and ceremonial goods that tell the story of the ebb and flow of habitation over thousands of years.
Stewart, Hale County, Ala. Christenberry Home Place. 2021.
Epes, Sumter County, Ala. Bathtub cattle trough. 2021.
Carbon Hill, Walker County, Ala. Wanda and Jerry unload Trump-themed fireworks. 2020.
“He’s my president–I just love him,” Wanda said as she went to kiss a box of “WE THE PEOPLE D.J. TRUMP” brand fireworks that guarantees “45 EPIC SHOTS.” Originally established as a mining and railroad community in 1863 by the Galloway Coal Company, Carbon Hill’s founders incorporated the town on February 14, 1891, nicknaming it “The Village of Love and Luck.” However, just two weeks prior a group of 200 white coal miners on strike from the Carbon Hill Coal and Coke Co. devolved into a violent mob after hearing rumor their strike would lead to layoffs. Afraid their jobs would be given to Black citizens, the mob terrorized the town. In 2019 Carbon Hill mayor Mark Chambers published several inflammatory statements on Facebook, including a call to “kill out” the LGBTQIA community. Chambers’ posts were later deleted, and he apologized. One year later Chambers aimed racist remarks at the Black Lives Matter movement in a Facebook comment that read in part, “When you put Black lives before all lives they can kiss my ass.” Three days after publishing the comment Chambers deleted his remarks and resigned. As of 2011, there were approximately 30 churches in Carbon Hill for a population of just over 2,000 residents, of which 89% are white and 25% live below the poverty line. More than 83% of local residents voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 election.
Macon County, Ala. Near the former site of Fort Bainbridge. 2021.
Located near several important Muscogee (Creek) towns along the Old Federal Road, Fort Bainbridge was constructed in 1814 to guard the US Army’s supply route into Creek territory. After the Indian Removal Act of 1830, local white landowners established a plantation using extensive forced labor of enslaved people.
Gadsden, Etowah County, Ala. Locust Street bridge, site of the lynching of Bunk Richardson. 2020.
In July 1905, four Black men–Jack Hunter, Vance Garner, Will Johnson, and Bunk Richardson–were arrested for the murder of a white woman in Gadsden. Although Richardson was innocent, a mob forced its way into the Etowah County jail where he was being held, beat him, and lynched him from the train trestle over the Coosa River. No one was ever held accountable for the lynching.
Birmingham, Jefferson County, Ala. Jeremiah. 2020.
The pictures collected here were made between September 2020–May 2021 while in residence with The Do Good Fund.
All photographs © Jared Ragland.
Essay by Catherine Wilkins, Ph.D.
Photographs edited and sequenced with Shane Rocheleau and McNair Evans.
Website produced by the Wiregrass Museum of Art and built by PushCrankPress with support from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Additional project support provided by the Magnum Foundation and Coleman Center for the Arts.
See additional images, project travelogue, and reading list at: jaredragland.com.
Throughout the duration of the project all effort was made in regard to public health and safety. Work was conducted following CDC and state mandated guidelines and the National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics.
Thank You: Alan Rothschild and The Do Good Fund, Dana-Marie Lemmer, Catherine Wilkins, Dave Brown, Lara Kosolapoff-Wright, Melissa Rea, Jackie Clay, Audra Tignor, Amy Jenkins, Shane Rocheleau, Fazilat Soukhakian and the Utah State University Department of Art + Design, Eliot Dudik, Matt Eich, McNair Evans, and John Lawrence.
I am indebted to the thoughtful research published by the Encyclopedia of Alabama and Equal Justice Initiative, as well as to the scholarship of: Wayne Flint; Harvey H. Jackson III; Kathryn H. Braund, Gregory A. Waselkov, and Raven M. Christopher; Ariella Azoulay; Scott Matthews; and Daegan Miller. And to everyone I have met along the way – especially Kevin, Payton, Antoine, Rusty and Sunshine, Cassie, Ben, Peter, and Mr. Farmer – thank you for your trust and generosity.