Artist Profiles

Nicol Ragland

// Filmmaker & Photographer

NICOL RAGLAND is a filmmaker and photographer from Los Angeles, California. Nicol is also the Creator, Founder, Photographer, and Pioneer of the Indigene Project with the mission of: “Artists, activists, and visionaries illuminating a grassroots uprising and thread of creative alliances leading us to more appropriate models of change”. Her fine art series, “Between Two Worlds”, is a passionate photographic work that shares the power of love, forgiveness, compassion birthed from a painful, yet auspicious, romantic relationship. Nicol Ragland has captured stories from around the world, including victims of the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, portraits of children with cancer, and young artists at work in studios, streets, and stages.

Website: www.nicolragland.com
Photo: Nicol Ragland Photography / NicolRagland.com

Interview:

As a photographer and filmmaker, I’ve found stories from all regions of the world that allow me to document the art of being human and the thread of creative alliances. I’ve photographed victims of the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, portraits of children with cancer from St. Jude’s hospital, gay weddings, farmers in Timor Leste on the front lines of climate change, monks in Burma under the oppression of the military junta, elders of a tribe of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania explaining their marginalization, and, most recently, young artists at work in studios, streets, and stages expressing all that they are through multiple mediums… just to name a few. My most recent fine art series, “Between Two Worlds,” is meant to subvert separatist thinking by reflecting back the destruction of life amongst the speed of our industrialized society.

The inspiration came from heartbreak. A very short but profound relationship came my way a couple of years ago and left me with a strong sense of unfinished mystery. By virtue of it being brief, I vacillated between it being perverse, painful, destructive as well as expansive, full of possibilities, and a love where you have no choice but to allow all walls to crumble. It felt primal where denying it felt like denying gravity but I had to because he had to go. It took a while but I learned that I had to accept the realm that held both emotions, a realm “between two worlds.” I think of this place for us, collectively. We live in a culture that perpetuates turning a blind eye away from our fear, our grief, and destruction while in that same place is a tremendous amount of resolution, love, and truth.

Forgiveness requires vulnerability. It requires the unleashing of your own ego. It requires the ability to face the truth. It requires a small crack—like a light leak in a camera—to penetrate your walls of division leaving you no choice but to give way. This body of work requires shouldering through fear, looking wholeheartedly into the unknown, exploration, questioning doubt, confronting unexamined assumptions, facing myself, and the recognition of something larger than me and my own desires in order to offer up a possibility of meaning, and the capacity for transformation.

Sometimes I create bodies of work knowing it may suffer the weight of its own futility but, in the end, I’m required to expand my perception, to consider another story and with the intention for the viewer of my frames to consider a newer view as well. I recently read a thought by Augusten Burroughs which read, “As it happens, we human beings are able to live just fine with many holes of many shapes and sizes. And pleasure, love, compassion, and fulfilment—these things do not leak out. So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography—and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.”

This is the power of art, to portray this and to reflect back both worlds of conflict as well as absolution. Never have we needed our artists more than now. As Arendt reminds us, “for they provide the subversive narratives that allow us to chart a new course.” Because of the stories I have covered and the humility they required as I dove deeper into each narrative, I’m continuously challenged to broaden my horizon and develop a larger sense of understanding.

“Never have we needed our artists more than now.”
– Nicol Ragland, Filmmaker & Photographer

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