{"id":7304,"date":"2025-05-21T15:54:27","date_gmt":"2025-05-21T15:54:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/05\/21\/observer-artist-interviews-photographer-rahim-fortune\/"},"modified":"2025-05-21T15:54:30","modified_gmt":"2025-05-21T15:54:30","slug":"observer-artist-interviews-photographer-rahim-fortune","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalgunowner.org\/index.php\/2025\/05\/21\/observer-artist-interviews-photographer-rahim-fortune\/","title":{"rendered":"Observer Artist Interviews: Photographer Rahim Fortune"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Rahim Fortune, Praise Dancers<\/em>, Edna, Texas, 2020; From the series Hardtack \/ Silver gelatin print, 30 x 40 inches. Copyright Rahim Fortune, courtesy Sasha Wolf Projects and Howard Greenberg Gallery<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Photographer Rahim Fortune<\/a> has spent a decade chronicling his family and the local lore of the south, yielding a body of work that is devoted, earnest and solemn. \u201cI tend to lean into the intensity,\u201d he once said<\/a>. Fortune\u2019s monograph, I Can\u2019t Stand to See You Cry<\/i><\/a>, published in 2022, was nominated for the Paris Photo-Aperture Photobook of the Year and won the Rencontres d\u2019Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award in 2022. This was followed in 2024 by Hardtack<\/i><\/a>, which earned him a nomination for the Deutsche B\u00f6rse Photography Foundation Prize this year, with accompanying work on view at The Photographers\u2019 Gallery in London through June 2025.<\/p>\n

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His exhibition \u201cReflections<\/a>\u201d at Howard Greenberg Gallery, in collaboration with Sasha Wolf Projects, includes thirty photographs and a short film that will be on view in New York for just a few more days. His contemporary photographs resonate with eight archival images by Black photography stalwarts Gordon Parks<\/a>, James Van Der Zee<\/a>, Roy DeCarava<\/a> and P. H. Polk, selected from Greenberg\u2019s archives. This fall, the exhibition will travel to The University of Texas\u2019 Art Galleries at Black Studies, an on-campus space showcasing art of the African diaspora.<\/p>\n

We spoke with Fortune about Black photographic lineage, not framing his subjects \u201cvirtuously\u201d and the shortcomings of the fashion world.<\/p>\n

What should people know about your path to becoming a photographer?<\/b><\/p>\n

I got into photography as an extension of music and skateboarding\u2014two things that I did for most of my youth, either in front of the camera or behind the camera. I became serious about it when I moved to New York after meeting Eli Reed<\/a>, the Magnum photographer, who really inspired me and showed me what was possible with the medium. I wasn\u2019t introduced to documentary photography as a serious social tool. I worked at a photo lab in Austin, and he was a professor at The University of Texas. When I was working at the lab, he was printing a portfolio to apply for a grant, so I was seeing this legendary photographer starting a new project. I feel like every time you start a new project, you go back to being a student and trying to figure it out again. Then I traveled to New York, and I was introduced to [photographers] Jim Goldberg<\/a> and Mike Brodie<\/a>, and they just completely opened up my mind.<\/p>\n

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Rahim Fortune, Smoking Cowboy<\/em>, Cheek, Texas, 2023; From the series Hardtack \/ Silver gelatin print, 24 x 20 inches. Copyright Rahim Fortune, courtesy Sasha Wolf Projects and Howard Greenberg Gallery<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cReflections\u201d is posited as \u201cdocumentary photography with personal history\u201d\u2014how do these two genres overlap, for you?<\/b><\/p>\n

I always go back to: There\u2019s no such thing as documentary photography, only documentary style. People have also coined the term post-documentary. There\u2019s this idea of objectivity and maybe slight editorialization of real life that would be characterized as documentary. It\u2019s posing as the truth. There\u2019s the old saying: \u201cthere\u2019s my truth, your truth and the truth.\u201d I like to think that there is a way in which people are learning about history and other sensitive subjects through my photographs\u2014but that\u2019s not the first goal. Personal history is so tied in: half of the show is my first book, I Can\u2019t Stand to See You Cry<\/i>, which is completely about my family. There\u2019s a photograph of my father during his final years, before he passed away. Hardtack<\/i> was made out of losing both of my parents, and going out and continuing to look for community and affirmation.<\/p>\n

Do you think visuals can have a palliative effect, relative to loss and grief?<\/b><\/p>\n

Photography plays a lot on memory. You see an image, and your reading of it is based on your own knowledge and assumptions. The very first book that I ever did was a self-published artist book called Oklahoma<\/i><\/a>, about my mother\u2019s family. My mother passed by suicide in 2007, and the Oklahoma suicide rate is double the national average. That\u2019s not not<\/i> disconnected from the fact of it having so many Native territories [Fortune is from the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma]. How do you grapple with losing a parent to suicide in middle school? I used photography. Photography allowed me to go digging up bones. It took it out of my head. That\u2019s healing, because for a long time, before I made that work, no one in my life knew anything about my time in Oklahoma, not even my father\u2019s family. It was really just this isolated thing that happened to me and my sister.<\/p>\n

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SEE ALSO: <\/strong><\/em>Arcangelo Sassolino On Fluid Time and Sculpting the Present <\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The reason I make my work is very selfish, but I also think that there is collective healing in people being able to recognize what you\u2019ve gone through, connected to their own story. My photographs are about Black American life and my own identity and background and grappling with those things, but I hope that there are these universal themes that people can recognize and apply to their own situations. That\u2019s one thing that I also go to other people\u2019s work for.<\/p>\n

Your images of the American South are being shown in New York. What do you hope to reflect about the region that maybe a New Yorker wouldn\u2019t grasp from existing myths or misperceptions?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

That\u2019s a thing that I try to avoid. I really don\u2019t try to force the social-political element of the work. That\u2019s for others to interpret. I find that to frame yourself that way is virtuous. To center a prejudice, and then to say you\u2019re going to shift it, you\u2019re then implying that your subjects need you to change their perception of how they\u2019re viewed. There\u2019s a great quote from Walker Evans, he says [loosely]: \u201cthat\u2019s the job of propaganda, not art photography, to change people\u2019s minds and sentiments.\u201d I don\u2019t know that I take on that responsibility. Also, there\u2019s already a wealth of photographs that do that. My work is about image-making. How do you use the camera, this tool, to convey something about reality that is so complicated and so full of contradictions? How do you make a photograph that is interesting as a photograph and not just a document of a beautiful person or a person with a great outfit on, and then put them together as a collection?<\/p>\n

In terms of lineage, your work is shown with eight archival photographs. Can you talk about selecting those and how that creates a conversation with your own work?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

Howard often shows very prolific posthumous artists, so to do a show with a young artist was a bold move. They wanted to bring in some of their archive as a way of not being completely out of left field. Their existing archive is massive. They own all the greats\u2014you could have had Dorothea Lange<\/a>\u2019s \u201cMigrant Mother.\u201d Even the DeCarava print that\u2019s in the show is an original from the 50s. It\u2019s like $50,000\u2014it\u2019s a unique<\/i> object.<\/p>\n

I often find that people haphazardly put together work by old photographers and young photographers; I think that can mostly be done poorly. My favorite photographer is Milton Rogovin<\/a>, and they have a lot of Rogovin\u2019s work, but I felt that that was not really conceptually interesting. I was thinking about Black practitioners in general, and ones who have maybe been passed over for this type of opportunity. I really believe in this idea that we stand on the shoulders of the giants who never got their due, outside of a select few galleries. The gallery showed me all of the work that they had collected from Black photographers, and that was what I had to work with. There were only four artists in the archive, and those are the artists that you see presented in the room.<\/p>\n

There are both portraits and landscapes in your work and the archival selection. Do you see those typologies as complementing each other, or do you see landscape as a form of portraiture?<\/b><\/p>\n

First and foremost, I\u2019m interested in photographs of people, but I think that forgotten architecture is just as important to understanding history. Where do people shop? Where do people pray? Where do people go to school? Those elements are important.<\/p>\n

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Rahim Fortune, Untitled Cowboy (Acres Homes)<\/em>, Houston, Texas, 2023; From the series Hardtack \/ Silver gelatin print, 20 x 24 inches. Copyright Rahim Fortune, courtesy Sasha Wolf Projects and Howard Greenberg Gallery<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The book, as a form, is what established your series. Showing the edit at Howard Greenberg, how does exhibiting provide a separate viewer experience?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

The edit for Howard Greenberg leans a bit less on the book. I did that layout myself, with the help of my partner, Miranda Barnes<\/a>, who gave some excellent feedback. Also, this is a gallery show, so there is a commercial ambition, which informed the edit with prints that were popular. But to see the prints in person: they\u2019re painstakingly printed with silver gelatin, and that\u2019s a different experience from seeing the tritone plates in the book. Sometimes, printed details that weren\u2019t prominent become prominent at that size.<\/p>\n

I read in a previous interview that you have a body of work in color in process. Could you talk about that?<\/b><\/p>\n

Yes, I\u2019m working in color. I\u2019m interested in that mostly out of a need not to repeat myself. It came as a commission through Aperture. They\u2019re working on a book that\u2019s going to engage the Texas African American Pictures Archive. It\u2019s about 10,000 objects dating back to daguerreotypes and tintypes all the way through the 1980s. They\u2019re re-engaging this archive as a book. They asked me to contribute pictures of Texas as the sole modern photographer in this book, which is a great honor. That will hopefully be coming out later in the year. There are about twenty color pictures that I made in Texas, photographing in the same areas where I made Hardtack<\/i>, but with a smaller camera working in color. It was a great experiment, and I feel like it put me on my way to now.<\/p>\n

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Rahim Fortune, I Can\u2019t Stand To See You Cry<\/em>, Texas, 2021; From the series I Can\u2019t Stand to See You Cry \/ Silver gelatin print, 24 x 20 inches. Copyright Rahim Fortune, courtesy Sasha Wolf Projects and Howard Greenberg Gallery<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You recently collaborated with Bottega Veneta\u2014was it challenging or liberating having a commission that\u2019s so outside of the sensitivity that you bring to your other work?\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been working in the commercial setting since I moved to New York. I was a commercial assistant for people who do beauty ads, so it wasn\u2019t completely out of my wheelhouse. As a commission, it was incredible; I was really happy with that film<\/a>. That was my first big campaign that I directed. It was also Matt [Blazy, who moved on to Chanel]\u2019s last collection with Bottega, which was special. Hopefully, Chanel calls. I\u2019m not opposed to it, but I think it has to be tasteful.<\/p>\n

There are some similarities to my work, as far as the portraiture and the closeness and the detail. But I want to be careful not to be overly editorializing my personal photographs. I feel that sometimes, when documentary photographers start applying their book projects to brands, sometimes you can\u2019t really go back to fine art\u2014like you use all of that interest up in the fashion world. It\u2019s a tricky balance. And the fashion world is peculiar; I\u2019m figuring out where I fit in with it. I mean, I\u2019m signed with one of the best agents in the States, but I seldom work. I think that the fashion world has chosen its people. I\u2019m figuring out if that\u2019s even something that I want to put myself through.<\/p>\n

A lot of my work is about trial and error. I found I\u2019ve had some trouble with fashion, because fashion is about getting it perfect every time. In general, where you don\u2019t have a world of producers and casting agents, you are going to constantly come up short. I just went on a trip\u2014I shot twelve rolls of film, and I think I maybe got one picture, and this was about thirty hours of driving. When you do fashion stuff, you\u2019re expected to nail it. I\u2019m still very much interested and will continue to shoot fashion editorials. But I don\u2019t think that, you know, the fashion world is beating down the door.<\/p>\n

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