AN UNFIXED PILGRIMAGE
Collaborative monograph with Sara J. WinstonTo be published by COMPOSIT Press, 2027
A collaborative photographic monograph by Jared Ragland and Sara J. Winston exploring place, belonging, and the unfinished work of finding home.
COMPOSIT Press is pleased to announce the publication of an unfixed pilgrimage, a collaborative photographic monograph by Jared Ragland and Sara J. Winston. The book traces two parallel journeys by artists whose lives—and practices—have been reshaped by relocation, loss, and the demands of a creative and academic life.
Ragland and Winston have known one another for fifteen years, beginning when Winston was a student of Ragland's at the Corcoran College of Art + Design in Washington, D.C. Their relationship has since evolved into one of trusted friendship and artistic peerage. Several years ago, in order to put stakes in the ground for the mirage of job security in academia, both Ragland and Winston settled in regions they struggled to call home—Ragland in northern Utah, Winston in the Hudson River Valley. For Ragland it was an alien, and alienating, landscape, far from his native Alabama; for Winston it was familiar countryside, only 40 miles north of where she grew up, but seen anew through the altered consciousness of parenthood and chronic illness.
Inspired by Wendell Berry's 1971 essay The Unforeseen Wilderness, an unfixed pilgrimage considers photography as both an outward act of observation and an inward process of self-discovery. Berry's call to use photography to "arrive at the ground at our own feet and learn to be at home" became a guiding principle for a project that asks how sustained attention to place might also transform one's understanding of self and family, community and belonging.
The work grew from "20-40-10," an assignment developed by Joe Cameron and Claudia Smigrod at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. The exercise requires students to expose 20 rolls of film, produce 40 work prints, and complete 10 final prints within a prescribed period. In homage to their shared Corcoran roots, they adopted the prompt and expanded it into a two-year collaborative investigation that yielded thousands of photographs.
The photographs document an intimate and elegiac, yet unresolved, journey—embracing a sense of uncertainty that suggests the search for belonging is not found in a specific time or place, but through the continued practice of attention, kinship, and care.
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Exhibitions:
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On the Shelf, Filter Photo, Chicago, IL (juried by Clint Woodside), 2024.
- Reciprocity: Expanding Ideas of Community, SPE West/Southwest Members Exhibition, Kimball Visual Art Center, Weber State University, Ogden, UT, 2024.
Awards:
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2025 PhotoNOLA Photobook Prize, Award of Excellence
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an unfixed pilgrimage
9 x 11" 144 pages. An annotated photocopy of an excerpt from Wendell Berry's essay The Unforeseen Wilderness is stapled to the cover.
Edition of 250.
2027 (forthcoming)
an unfixed pilgrimage
Special Edition Box: 9.5 x 11.5" when closed, 33 x 11.5" when open. Box contains two foldout flaps: the left features a contact print, the right an archival pigment print. Eight boxes will feature prints by Ragland, eight by Winston. The book is housed in the center, situated above a well containing an exposed, yet undeveloped, roll of film by each artist. The original assignment sheet that inspired the work is attached to the front of the box.
Edition of 16.
2027 (forthcoming)
an unfixed pilgrimage
Artist book, 80 pages with 40 photographs, saddle stiched and case bound by the artists
Edition of 2
2024
The trade and special edition of an unfixed pilgrimage is preceded by a handmade artist book (edition of 2), produced in 2019 at at Nine Marks Studio in Richmond, Va., and featuring 40 black and white photographs (20 by Ragland; 20 by Winston) situated alongside text from The Unforeseen Wilderness.
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