Behind the lens

Although his artwork may suggest otherwise, photographer Jared Ragland tries to show that everything’s not black and white.

“There’s a pervasive narrative that exists about drug users, particularly methamphetamine users, who are stereotyped as these poor, uneducated people living these chaotic lives,” said Ragland, who is also a faculty member at the UAB department of art and art history.

Ragland recently used his camera to tease out the complex human realities underlying this stereotype while working with UAB criminologist Heith Copes on a study of meth users on Alabama’s Sand Mountain.

Over a 15-month period, Ragland took 15,000 striking, often painfully intimate pictures of users while Copes interviewed them regarding their lives and addictions.

The project — the men have tentatively titled it “Good Bad People” — will likely lead to a book, an exhibition and a website, Ragland said.

But more important, the men wanted “to show that these people’s lives are complex and tragic, but also hopeful, and they — just like everybody else — are trying … to do the best they can,” he said.

Judging by the images that Ragland already is showing to critics and curators, he has succeeded.

A middle-aged meth user named Fred, whose T-shirt reads “This is what awesome looks like,” smiles for the camera and holds up a glassine envelope of crystal.

“That’s two eight balls of meth,” Ragland said.

A woman named Willow, looking into her mirror, struggles to shoot some meth into her arm.

“In this photograph, she has stuck herself six or eight times searching for a vein,” Ragland said. “She’s crying.”

A pretty young addict named Alice — she once had a chance for an acting career in New York and Los Angeles — sleeps with her boyfriend on their sofa in the couple’s trailer.

“[It] was the filthiest place I’ve ever seen,” Ragland said.

In August, Ragland exhibited 10 of the Sand Mountain pictures at San Francisco’s Rayko Photo Center. In October, Ragland opened a solo show featuring 22 of the images at Georgia’s LaGrange College. He showed six of them at The Center for Photography in Greenville, South Carolina.

It’s no surprise Ragland was passionate about this project. In addition to art photography, he is a documentary photographer who has worked in such locales as Haiti and Eastern Europe.

“After the first day, I knew I found the ideal partner for the project,” Copes said. “He was incredible in the field, and his pictures are truly amazing.”

Ragland said getting to know the addicts as real people made him want “to look deeper, to be more kind, to be sensitive.”

And Ragland — while stressing he doesn’t seek to elicit “a bleeding-heart response” — seems clear about the effect he would like the images to have.

“I think I would ask my audience … to think about nuance and complexity, to think about kindness, of giving people a little bit more than we normally want to give,” Ragland said.

“[The users] have done things that could easily be defined as bad, but they are more complex and have richer stories,” Copes said. “Jared recognizes this and strives to show it in the photographs.”