Rahim Fortune’s dreamlike vision of the Black American South
- Text by Miss Rosen
- Photography by Rahim Fortune, courtesy Sasha Wolf Projects and Howard Greenberg Gallery
Reflections — In the Texas native’s debut solo show, he weaves familial history and documentary photography to challenge the region’s visual tropes.
Native son of the American South, photographer Rahim Fortune traces the intricate, intimate bonds of family, culture, and community in Reflections, his first solo exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. The show brings together works from his distinct yet interwoven series, Hardtack and I Can’t Stand to See You Cry, which comprise the two thirds of a de facto trilogy that began with his first monograph, Oklahoma, self-published in 2020.
Hailing from Kyle, Texas, Fortune and his sister spent their formative years in Tupelo, Oklahoma, with his mother, a member of the Chickasaw Nation, who died in 2007. Where Oklahoma sprung from his matrilineal roots, I Can’t Stand to See You Cry sees Fortune return to home to provide end of life care for his father, who is Black, set against the backdrop of contemporary Texan life.
With Hardtack, which takes its name from a simple recipe of water, salt, and flour that Buffalo Soldiers fashioned to keep themselves going on the frontier, Fortune looked across the sweeping vista of the South to craft a portrait of Black life within the long arc of art history. For centuries, the American South has been cast through the filmy gauze of myth. But it was Roy Stryker Jr. and his squadron of FSA (Farm Security Administration) photographers like Gordon Parks, Walker Evans, and Dorothea Lange who formalised a visual language widely used today.
“People have been striving to create something removed from its time, something that is wilfully nostalgic. Even in the ’40s, they were trying to call back ‘the good old days’ so I used that language deliberately in Hardtack,” says Fortune. In his hands, timelessness becomes a reprieve from the onslaught of progress’s clammy grip. In Fortune’s photographs, mobile phones disappear without a trace, modernity nothing more than a fever dream from which you awake to cowboys, kerosene lamps, rustic barns, praise ceremonies, and handmade quilts.
- Read next: An ode to America’s legendary cowboy culture
Although the photographs feel timeless, they do not feel old. Rather than contain the wisdom of ancestors passed from one generation to the next, the recipes endure because they are closely tied to survival. Within that lineage, Fortune finds his place alongside groundbreaking Black American photographers including the aforementioned Parks, James Van Der Zee, Roy DeCarava, and Prentice H. Polke, whose pictures are shown alongside his in a second smaller room at the gallery.
Working across portraiture, documentary, still life, and landscape, Fortune crafts scenes that unfold through the panoramic sweep of Black American history, embedded in the earth itself. “So much of Oklahoma where I grew up, and where my family is native to, was a memory, and now there are people in midtown Manhattan looking at pictures of these places,” Fortune says. “There is a reverence or visibility to it that I think is healing. It's a lot better than it just being trapped inside of you.”
Rahim: Fortune: Reflections is on view through May 24, 2025, at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York.
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