RAGLAND: Everything is Going to be Alright
Everything is Going to be Alright
JARED RAGLAND
May 4 - June 24, 2017
ABOUT THE PROJECT
“All these years I have been assuming that between us words mean roughly the same thing, that among certain people, gentlefolk I don’t mind calling them, there exists a set of meanings held in common.” – Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
In “Everything is Going to Be All Right” Jared Ragland reflects on his personal history living in the American South and visually narrates the existential journey of Walker Percy’s character, Binx Bolling from the 1961 novel, The Moviegoer. Set in New Orleans, The Moviegoer follows Binx’s pilgrimage for a clearer understanding of himself. In a similar way, Ragland’s work challenges viewers to experience beyond the lens of visual observation, encouraging them to reflect within, and strive for a more personal understanding. Steeped in the New Orlean’s landscape, the images within the series are a combination of black and white photographs and appropriated, digitally sourced images that often blur our perception of reality and evoke a deeper meaning.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jared Ragland (MFA, Tulane University) is a fine art and documentary photographer and former White House photo editor. His collaborative visual practice draws upon social science, literary, and historical research methodologies to examine questions of identity, marginalization, and the histories of place. He currently serves on the faculty at the University of Mississippi as Instructional Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History and affiliate faculty at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
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. He has served as Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of South Florida’s Judy Genshaft Honors College and held faculty positions at Utah State University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the Corcoran College of Art + Design.
Jared’s work has been exhibited around the world in more than 100 solo and group exhibitions, including recent shows at The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery, Ala.), Kimball Art Center (Park City, Utah), University of Mississippi’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture (Oxford, Miss.), Texas Tech University (Lubbock, Texas), The Do Good Fund (Columbus, Ga.), Center for Photography at Woodstock (Kingston, N.Y.), Filter Photo (Chicago, Ill.), Candela (Richmond, Va.), Foto Forum Santa Fe (Santa Fe, N.M.), Birmingham Museum of Art SHIFT space (Birmingham, Ala.), The National Geographic Society (Washington, D.C.), and the Royal Geographic Society (London, UK). His photographs have been featured by The New Yorker, New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Vanity Fair Italia, and The Oxford American, and his visual ethnographic research has been published in more than two dozen social science textbooks and high-impact journals, including the first photographs to ever be published in the flagship social sciences journal, Criminology. In 2015, Jared was named one of TIME Magazine’s “Instagram Photographers to Follow in All 50 States.” He is a 2020 Magnum Foundation grantee, 2020-21 Do Good Fund Artist-in-Residence, 2021 Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 artist, 2022 Aftermath Project Finalist, 2025 Brooklyn Darkroom Artist-in-Residence, and 2025 Center for Photographic Art Mid-Career grantee. His first film, “Some Million Miles,” (co-directed with Adam Forrester) has screened in festivals around the world and was distributed nationally by PBS. A forthcoming monograph, “an unfixed pilgrimage,” co-authored with Sara J. Winston, will be published by Oregon State University’s Composit Press in 2027.
During his tenure at the White House with the Bush (43) and Obama Administrations, Jared edited and designed photo books for the President, produced photographic exhibitions for the Leica Gallery New York, Leica Gallery Berlin, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, and he was part of the editing team responsible for the release of the iconic photographs of President Obama in the Situation Room during the raid on Osama bin Laden.
