Alabama has known a deep and complex history. From Native American genocide to slavery and secession, and from the fight for civil rights to the championing of Trumpist ideology, the state has stood at the nexus of American identity. In many ways, Alabama has also played a pivotal role in the history of photography. “For more than a century, travel writers, folklorists, journalists, photographers, and filmmakers attempted to reveal the realities of life in rural Alabama, and, by extension, the South, through documentary forms of expression,” writes Scott Matthews. “Their portrayal of (the place) and its people, however, contributed to a broader twentieth-century romance of the rural South that transformed the faces, landscapes, and architecture of the poor into art that resonated with educated, middle-class audiences eager to see and experience islands of vernacular beauty and authenticity in a sea of standardization.”
Social isolation is both a phrase and an experience that has defined the past year in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, and the images in What Has Been Will Be Again expressly evoke the loneliness that has characterized this period. Yet What Has Been... features subjects for whom social isolation is nothing new. The project, instead, makes a case for a long history of isolation and alienation—one that has exacted a costly human toll vis-à-vis generations 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.
Begun in Fall 2020, What Has Been Will Be Again has led me across colonial routes including the Old Federal Road and Hernando de Soto's 1540 expedition to bear witness to and connect with the individuals and communities plagued by generational poverty and the exploitation of the environment. Such images speak to the forced marginalization of African-Americans, Indigenous people, and members of the LGBTQ+ population across Alabama’s past (and present). Accompanied by historicizing captions, the images also catalogue sites of injustice, at once mirroring and challenging the silence of historical narratives that, for so long, have failed to speak the names, dates, and places where such raucous violence occurred. While certain images visualize the ancestral home of Alabama’s First People and evoke notions of Indigenous exile, erasure, and abuse, other images reflect the white nationalism that embodies the exclusionary politics of today.
There is a paradox that purposely exists in What Has Been: 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. By tying together events in Alabama’s centuries-long past with present-day issues, the project 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 What Has Been Will Be Again confirms that the isolation, socioeconomic inequalities, racism, and marginalization we’ve witnessed is not unprecedented. Instead, it speaks specifically to our current moment while also illustrating the perpetuated use of segregation and sequestration in service of the myths of American individualism and exceptionalism.
