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 MAGA ideology, the national history written on, in, and by the people and landscapes of Alabama reveal problematic patterns at the nexus of larger American identity. The state has also played a pivotal role in the history of photography. Throughout the twentieth century photographers like Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, William Christenberry, among others, documented life in Alabama, and in many ways formed the backbone of an American documentary storytelling.

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 work contends with sites for which isolation, conflict, and violence is nothing new–places where extracted labor and environmental exploitation have exacted heavy tolls for 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.

Working deep within territory considered a repository of national repressions during a moment defined by pandemic and protest, economic uncertainty, and political polarization, “What Has Been Will Be Again” has led me into each of Alabama’s 67 counties and across routes connected to brutal colonial legacies including the path of Hernando de Soto’s 1540 expedition, the Trail of Tears, and the Old Federal Road. Accompanied by historicizing captions, the photographs reflect upon the forced marginalization of African-Americans, Indigenous people, and members of the LGBTQ+ population, and challenge the silence of historical—and photographic—narratives that have long failed to speak the names, dates, and places where such violence has occurred. By using a Southern Gothic visual sensibility to articulate very real social isolation, “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.