What Has Been Will Be Again

Abstract

Abstract: Photographer Jared Ragland uses a Southern Gothic sensibility to visually contend with Alabama's centuries-long past, its present-day issues, and the perpetuated use of segregation and sequestration in service of the white supremacist myths of American exceptionalism. While the black-and-white photographs demonstrate similarities in style and content to the works of journalistic, literary, and artistic predecessors in the Southern Gothic tradition, they also engage and reframe fraught narrative relationships between historical trauma and contemporary sociopolitical issues in the American South. In so doing, "What Has Been Will Be Again" both meets, then disrupts, audience expectations for the Southern Gothic in its representation of past and present problems of place.