Scholars Eric Savoy and Robert Martin describe American Gothic as a “discursive field in which a metonymic national ‘self’ is undone by the return of its repressed Otherness.” In What Has Been Will Be Again (2020–2022), photographer Jared Ragland underscores the significance not only of his art form but of place as an important contributor to this critical discourse about American national identity. Initially commissioned as a Do Good Fund artist residency, Ragland’s documentary photography project grapples with manifestations of a problematic past resurfacing in present-day Alabama. Its geographic focus and connection to a journalistic, literary, and artistic heritage identify the historical realities, culture, and climate of the South as particularly well suited to destabilize American idealism and force a reckoning with uncomfortable truths about the nation and ourselves.
Working deep in territory that Allison Graham has called a “repository of national repressions,” Ragland traveled to each of his home state’s sixty-seven counties, often via routes connected to a brutal colonial legacy—following the path of Hernando de Soto’s 1540 expedition, the Trail of Tears, the Old Federal Road, and the slave ship Clotilda. This methodology adopts a core tenet held by scholars of place studies, who assert that pilgrimages to sites where historical events happened (but are not happening anymore) are meaningful because the places themselves are imbued with a particular energy or spirit of authenticity. The energy of these specific historical sites is often charged with anxiety, violence, and peculiarity.
In keeping with the theme of walking in the footsteps of those who came before, Ragland’s images are made in the tradition of photographers who helped shape and continue the Southern Gothic visual aesthetic, merging the worlds of southern reportage by Walker Evans with more contemporary, expressive works by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Mark Steinmetz, and Debbie Fleming Caffery. Pictures like “Michael Farmer,” “Perine Well,” and “Macon County, Ala.” are disquieting studies in black and white that depict “outsiders,” haunting landscapes, and decay, imbued with a pensive fear, tension, and sense of mortality. Despite their strangeness, the photographs are visually familiar, creating a throughline with twentieth-century representations of Southern Gothic themes, suggesting the continued relevance of the social commentary on race, poverty, and marginalization embodied in earlier artistic works.