NEWS
RECENT/UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS + PUBLICATIONS:
(click links in bold or see blog entries below for more info)
Recent and Upcoming Exhibitions:
- What Has Been Will Be Again, Union Grove Gallery, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL
- New Orleans du Nuit, Second Story Gallery, New Orleans, LA (juried by David Joshua Jennings and Bruce “Sunpie” Barnes)
Recent Select Publications:
- “In Idaho, a preview of RFK Jr.’s vaccine-skeptical America,” photographs for The Washington Post
- Visual Methods for Sensitive Images: Ethics and Reflexivity in Criminology On/Offline, published by Palgrave Macmillan
- “Being Better People: Drug Using Careers and Petyote” published in Justice Quarterly, the top-ranked criminology journal in the world
- New South published by Atlanta Center for Photography
- “What Has Been Will Be Again,” Southern Cultures
- “Slaying the vampire that is killing bats,” photographs for The Washington Post
- “Peyote as Earth Medicine: Examining How Symbolic Meanings Shape Experiences With Psychedelics” published in The British Journal of Criminology, featuring photographs from The Circle
- “Biden’s renewable energy goals blow up against a painful WWII legacy,” photographs for The Washington Post
- Reckonings & Reconstructions published by UGA Press
- “Sex, Drugs, and Coercive Control: Gendered Narratives of Methamphetamine Use, Relationships, and Violence” photo essay published in Criminology, the first ever of its kind for the flagship social science journal
......................................
The New Orleans Photo Alliance has named an unfixed pilgrimage as the 2025 Award of Excellence in the second annual PhotoNOLA Photobook Prize, juried by Bill Boling of Fall Line Press.
The PhotoNOLA Photobook Prize celebrates creativity and excellence in photobook publishing. As the Award of Excellence winner, the book will be featured at the Photobook Prize table at the PhotoWALK and Photobook Fair at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art during the 2026 PhotoNOLA Festival in December.
an unfixed pilgrimage is co-authored with Sara J. Winston and features 40 black and white photographs (20 by Ragland; 20 by Winston) situated alongside text from Wendell Berry’s The Unforeseen Wilderness. The pictures document a range of intimate and quotidian moments while seeking beauty and meaning within domestic spaces and the wider landscapes of home. The book was edited, designed, printed, and case bound by the artists as two artist proofs in summer 2024 at Eliot Dudik Studios.
......................................
WHAT HAS BEEN WILL BE AGAIN will be on view at the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Union Grove Gallery, Jan. 12-Feb. 20. A closing reception is scheduled for Feb. 19 at 6pm.
The exhibition will feature several new photographs, made with support of a 2025 Brooklyn Darkroom Residency and 2025 Center for Photographic Art Mid-Career Artist Grant.
......................................
On Sunday, Oct. 18, I will be joined with my longtime collaborator, Cary Norton, in making wet-plate collodion tintypes during the 2025 Plein Air Invitational at William Faulkner’s old mule farm, Greenfield Farm, located just outside of Oxford, Miss. Cary and I are excited to debut a handbuilt 16x20 mammoth plate camera -- a camera that Cary has had in the works for nearly five years.
Participating artists include: Kaleena Stasiak, Catherine Jones, Jared Ragland, Rowan Haug, Joshua Brinlee, Stacy Rathert, Jingshuo Yang, Aubrey Pohl, Carlyle Wolfe; with a poetry reading by former Mississippi Poet Laureate Beth Ann Fennelly.
The Plein Air Invitational is a collaboration between the University of Mississippi and Mississippi State University, curated by Brooke P. Alexander & Caroline Hatfield, and is presented by Visit Oxford MS, the Yoknapatawpha Arts Council, and Greenfield Farm Writers Residency, a project of the Mississippi Lab at the University of Mississippi.
......................................
Hello from my new home in Mississippi, where I’ve joined the faculty at the University of Mississippi and moved everything into this 100 year old shotgun house (well, mostly everything). The house originally came from a town called Alligator over in the Delta and was plunked down here a few decades ago, just a few miles south of Oxford and off the old road where Faulkner would run his horses and Bill Eggleston once drove his car into a ditch. Over yonder is a good swimming hole and out back is a fallow cotton field. Some nights the septuagenarian who lives in the farmhouse across the field will come by for a drink. She is a real spitfire and can put down more Bud heavies than an Sig Nu on Saturday night. We plan to walk to town for a piece of catfish soon. Meanwhile I just got off the wait list at the post office for a PO Box; no one here in this town of 300 keeps a regular mailbox. I got number 12 because one of the old timers died, I reckon.
Anyway, I couldn’t be more excited to join such a storied institution in such a storied place, with the charge of shepherding the transition of the photo program into a new era. But I’m also here simply because I want to be. “How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home,” Faulkner once wrote. After several years in the desert (literally and figuratively), this is the place where I'll make home, tend to an irreparably broken heart, and redouble my photographic work within a rich and familiar geography. At this point in life, fresh starts are few and far between. I’m grateful to have this one and to be home on this little postage stamp of native soil.
Y'all come visit.
......................................