Jared Ragland
Jared Ragland (b. 1977) is a fine art and documentary photographer and former White House photo editor. His visual practice critically confronts issues of identity, marginalization, and history of place through social science, literary, and historical research methodologies.
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. His work has been exhibited internationally, and his photographs have been featured by The New Yorker, New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, and The Oxford American, while his visual ethnographic research has been published in more than a dozen social science textbooks and high-impact academic journals.
As a 2020-21 Do Good Fund Artist-in-Residence, Ragland traveled across more than 25,000 miles and all 67 counties in his home state of Alabama to photograph during a critical moment of pandemic and protest, economic uncertainty, and political polarization. By tracing historic colonial routes including the Old Federal Road and Hernando de Soto’s 1540 expedition while bearing witness to ongoing racial, ecological, and economic injustice, What Has Been Will Be Again illustrates the perpetuated segregation and sequestration masked by white supremacist myths of American exceptionalism. What Has Been Will Be Again was made with additional support from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and National Endowment for the Arts, Magnum Foundation, Wiregrass Museum of Art (Dothan, Ala.), Coleman Center for the Arts (York, Ala.), and the Aftermath Project.