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 our larger American identity.

Working deep within a territory considered a repository of national repressions, What Has Been Will Be Again traces 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 to contend with Alabama’s fraught history and confront the white supremacist myths of American exceptionalism.

Social isolation is both a phrase and experience that defined the COVID-19 pandemic, and What Has Been Will Be Again expressly evokes the alienation that characterized the moment. Yet the work features sites for which isolation and violence is nothing new—places where extracted labor and environmental exploitation have exacted heavy tolls over 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 our collective frame of vision.

By combining a Southern Gothic visual sensibility with narrative captions, the photographs reflect upon the forced marginalization of African- Americans, Indigenous people, and members of the LGBTQ+ population, thereby challenging the silence of historical narratives that have long failed to speak the names, dates, and places where such violence has occurred.