Rahim Fortune: “Hardtack” and Other Stories
Christian-Green Gallery

This exhibition surveys three major photographic book projects by award-winning photographer Rahim Fortune (born 1994): Hardtack (2024), I can’t stand to see you cry (2021), and Oklahoma (2020). Based in Central Texas and an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. Fortune’s work comprises an extended engagement with histories of documentary, portraiture, and landscape photography from the last century. Drawing on predecessors such as Dawoud Bey, Roy DeCarava, Dorothea Lange, Danny Lyon, and Prentice H. Polk, Fortune investigates cultural geographies of Black and Indigenous communities in the US South, drawing on his personal experience as well as the region’s mythologies, especially as it has manifested in the history of photography.

By presenting Fortune’s photo books on the gallery’s walls, this exhibition allows visitors to examine more closely the poignant intimacy of individual photographs while drawing narrative connections across these three major bodies of work. Their convergent stories delineate Fortune’s shifting relationships to family, home, identity, and nationhood over nearly a decade of making. As a eulogy and elegy for the American South, Fortune’s practice interweaves complex landscapes of loss and love, migration and place-making, and the intersection of Black and Indigenous experiences that have defined his life. Rahim Fortune: “Hardtack” and Other Stories examines these stories as the artist’s ongoing expression of the sticky dualities of southern living.

https://www.galleriesatut.org/gallery-showings/rahim-fortune