UNSPOKEN PSALM

Black Diamonds is a personal endeavor, an effort to connect with and understand the region I now call home. As a person of color, I define my community based on personal experience, which diverges from the stereotypes of race, religion, gender, and politics that can be attached to the area by outsiders. When violence across the nation is aimed at specific groups of people, my images ask implicitly: Am I accepted in this community? Am I safe here?

It is also a visual narration hinting at life as it once was, sharing the hyper-realism of what it is today and the uncertainty of what it is to become in a post-coal era.

These communities, pieces of a whole, are the former coal mining boomtowns of bygone days. The era of coal-fired prosperity was short lived, lasting roughly 50 years from 1870‒1920. After draining the mountains of their bounty and the people of their power, the industry moved on—but the heritage remains.

Life in Appalachia is fraught with mystery and mis-characterization; it’s marginalized or otherwise stereotyped as little more than “Trump Country.” Yet, in all my interactions, that name has never once been involved—in this place, the simple needs of day-to-day survival loom larger than the abstract issues of politics.

My work is experiential and a visual exploration of place, community, and cultural identity in a polarized political climate and racially divided era in the United States. The images strive for an understanding of people and place through their daily goings-on.

In the rural isolated foothills, pocked with poverty, these facets of Appalachia coexist with one another. A heritage of hospitality, not hate, is an unspoken psalm.

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 our larger American identity. Photographed at a critical moment of pandemic and protest, economic uncertainty, and political polarization, What Has Been Will Be Again has led photographer Jared Ragland across more than 25,000 miles and into each of Alabama’s 67 counties to survey his home state’s cultural and physical landscape.

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 photographs bear witness to 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 the collective frame of vision. Read more below.

By tracing the Trail of Tears, Old Federal Road, and Hernando de Soto’s 1540 expedition route, What Has Been Will Be Again contends with Alabama’s centuries-long past and present-day issues and strategically focuses on the importance of place, the passage of time, and the visual-political dimensions of remembrance to confront white supremacist myths of American exceptionalism.

Text by Catherine Wilkins, Ph.D., University of South Florida.

What Has Been Will Be Again was initially commissioned as a 2020-21 Do Good Fund Artist-in-Residence project and made with grants from The Magnum Foundation, The Aftermath Project, and Alabama State Council on the Arts, with additional support by Columbus State University, Wiregrass Museum of Art, Coleman Center for the Arts, Auburn University at Montgomery, and Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts.

Special thanks to AUM Professor William Fenn and AUM photography students Akeyah Henderson and Grayson McDaniel.