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It’s only been nine years since photographer Rahim Fortune began his professional career, but in that time he’s grown into one of the industry’s leading contemporary portraitists and documentarians. Through his camera lens, Fortune explores American identity with his striking black-and-white images, primarily taken in the American South.
From shooting fashion editorials to photographing celebrities like Solange Knowles to making images of essential workers during the initial onset of COVID-19, Fortune’s work offers a profound sense of timelessness and understanding of the medium. His second book, I can’t stand to see you cry, made waves in 2021 when it was nominated for the Paris PhotoBook Award, and later, won the Rencontres d’Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award in 2022.
His latest release, Hardtack, published by Loose Joints, features a collection of images made over a decade that focus on Black culture’s enduring traditions. The body of work tackles heritage and ritual by linking portraiture and landscape—homing in on details such as the haze surrounding a rodeo cowboy, and the clouds hanging heavy above a dirt road, threatening to release their humidity. Other images carry the legacy of the legions of photographers who came before Fortune and inspired him.
“If you notice there’s not really many signifiers of the time within the book,” he said of his latest effort. “A lot of the images almost feel as though they could have been made in any decade. I feel as though what you end with is a set of photographs that speak to an intergenerational connectedness to history that we maybe don’t have the most control over, but truly affects most parts of our lives.”
Vanity Fair recently spoke to Fortune about his interest in and exploration of photo history, how he came to land on the American South as a major topic in his work, and the making of Hardtack.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Vanity Fair: I wanted to start by talking a little bit about how this book is a follow-up to I can’t stand to see you cry, published in 2021. That was a reimagining of where you’re from, similar, I think, to your first book Oklahoma. Is HardTack also a reimagining? Or do you see it as settling into a place?
Rahim Fortune: Both Oklahoma and I can’t stand to see you cry are books that are very much about my family. I used those projects to develop my language with photography. I would say that this project is stylistically a step into a new direction. The images were made over a long period of time, towards the end of the project I felt as though I became a little bit more confident with how I approached making photographs. And also narrative-wise—following the passing of both of my parents, I began to become really interested in these ideas of community and family dynamics, but also stories that were lost.
There are a lot of things that I wish that I could have spoken with my parents about that I don’t have context to, and so, I felt this profound urgency of collecting stories and of contextualizing place and history. The primary way in which I find the books connected is within I can’t stand to see you cry, you very much see me functioning within my own nuclear family. But in this work, I’m stepping out as a more extended family, friend, brother, or whatever role was required to occupy within the various spaces in which I photographed.
That makes me think when, during a talk with Gregory Harris at the High Museum of Art, you spoke briefly about newspaper photographers and holes in archives, particularly in the South. Are you seeing yourself, especially with this project, as an archivist? Has any of your practice become about wanting to fill holes in the archives of a specific place?
No, I would more so say it’s just an artistic expression. The archives are definitely there and I think that’s more the work of scholars, historians, and researchers, where I am visually stitching together stories from various places and various connectivity. But that’s all viewed through my own lens of expression. A lot of the people who I photograph and within any photographic practice, it’s as much about the person who’s making the images as it is about the people in the photographs.
I was also really interested in the idea that post-COVID-19 and post-hyper-consumer culture, that it’s still possible to produce a body of work in the real world because of the limitations that we’re challenged with, especially as America becomes more homogenous in how it looks. So, to find places that still have unique characteristics and are bound to history in this way, was also part of the challenge to overcome within making this book.
I definitely don’t think I can take credit for filling in any holes in the archive that don’t already exist. I mean, I was so inspired by the photography that came before me, that it was so brilliantly executed, to even just to come up short was a success in being in conversation with the people who I admire.
With Hardtack being so tied to photo history and being rooted in the history of the South, which has had a really tumultuous and even contemporarily challenging history, I think at times it’s also been really a commodified space to profile. I’m curious how you’ve navigated that while making this work.
I think that just not being reactionary with how I share the images or how they come out into the world, many of these photographs weren’t shared on social media prior to the book coming out. That really allows you to make something that’s your own creation versus something that is of a certain moment.
I had a similar thing with the previous book. Around the time that I made I can’t stand to see you cry, there was a flood of pandemic projects and protest photographs. And so, to put something out of that nature at that time was risky because of the visual noise that was coming out around COVID-19 and around the protests, things of that nature.
How do you not get lost in this wave of what some maybe call a “trendy” image stream? The way that I, hopefully, combated that was thinking about particular storylines in the book being the churches or being the rodeos, subjects that are heavily photographed. Thinking about how can I make the photographs different? Or how can I show them in a different way that offers a different view, or perspective, or framing of these places? And also not making them so central in the book storyline.
How do you think that your migration from this region to New York and then back has influenced your understanding of your way of seeing that identity?
I moved to New York in 2016 to study at CUNY. I would spend a lot of time in the library between classes with the photography books that were there, they had a pretty good selection of books that I hadn’t seen. I began looking at a lot of new topographic photography people like Robert Adams or Lewis Baltz. And I was seeing these very melancholy gray photographs of the American West. That’s when I started to realize, “Oh, wow, this looks a lot like where I grew up” and began trying to crack a formula for making good pictures. That’s when I began to travel back to Oklahoma to make photographs there and try to emulate the people who had influenced me. I don’t think that I would’ve been able to recognize that, had I not gotten that juxtaposition of the big city.
New York had its own excitement as well, especially with all of its reference within popular culture, which was primarily what I knew of New York before moving there and it becoming my second home. With moving back to the South as well, I had always traveled back fairly frequently to Texas, especially as my father became ill. Texas became this escape for me. I was able to come here, spend time with family, make photographs that in a way felt as though they’re my own, instead of getting too caught up in the bustle of what fashion editorial I was shooting or what jobs I was getting. Texas was something that was uniquely my own that had always been photographing.
When I moved back, a lot of the things that I photographed were just events I enjoyed being at and participating in. The parades, the celebrations, the pageants, or rodeos, I just enjoyed being there. If I made a photo that was good, but if not, I also just enjoyed my time there. Meeting people and going to historic sites and researching about maybe where the next photo will lead me is something that I hope to find within my next projects as well.
What does it mean for you to be one of the people who gets to share what it means to be a Black artist hailing from the South through your work?
It is a privilege to be able to share my work and to be able to share these stories, and my experiences with audiences around the world really. It’s something that I don’t take lightly and try my best to honor the people who are in my photographs, and my family who have been in my photographs and passed on. Especially as far as artists who are making work about the South, I definitely encourage multiple viewpoints and people to be creative in whatever format it is. It’s about supporting people who are creative in whatever medium. Whether it’s dance, or if it’s literally even young people who are expressing themselves through social media. I try to be very open about what that can look like, so that we don’t get this homogenous view that’s purist or traditional, that’s not really my MO.
Also, the generation who came before us who laid the groundwork—there’s a lot of brilliant Black photographers who have made extensive work in Texas. I want to make work that they feel is carrying on the lineage, but also I think there’s always going to be a little bit of differences in our approaches, and in our times and generations.
A lot of your subjects are either quite young or elderly people. Why were you drawn to them?
There are definitely a few middle-aged people within the book, hopefully I was able to get a range of people of where they’re at in life and where they’re situated within the generation. I think of one image in particular that’s called “Deontay.” It’s taken in New Sweden, Texas. And he’s leaning forward, looking away from the camera. And on his chest, he has three dates tattooed, they’re 1947, 1968, and 2017. Most likely emblematic of either birth or death years. But I think about how these three years situate him within a generation. Someone who has grandparents who were born in 1947 or ’68, or someone who passed in ’17. Like I said, a lot of this book comes from my own autobiographical lens, but also from friends who are of similar generation. In some of the images, you’ll see of open roads, there are a lot of those photographs in the book, they’re meant to be a grounding narrative tool that would show you that I’m the one traveling between places and making these connections. It is this two-way transaction of storytelling or memory.
It sounds like it was an incredibly conscious decision to include the archetypes that you did. Was there any work that you felt was almost too referential? Or anything you think successfully advanced the narrative around the tropes featured?
That sometimes can be the difficult thing about whenever you begin to do press for a project like this. There’s a Robert Adams quote where he was like, “If I knew how to explain it, then why did I make the picture?” And it’s this idea that I could only explain it to you worse than what the photograph does.
I’m someone who’s always looking at different photographs and especially when I was working on this book, I was writing an essay for a book that came out called “A Long Arc,” which was published by Aperture. I was thinking about these different points in which we arrive at the archive. If it’s a studio photographer who made 30 images a day of couples and families, but these photographs would go on to live in people’s family albums and be what we really know of our ancestors and people who came before us. You can kind of argue, well, how much did that person really invest into these portraits if he made hundreds of them in his lifetime? And that’s not to say that these studio photographers didn’t care because I’m sure they put a lot of love into the work that they did. But where we put virtue within photographs is really interesting. Or if it’s photographs of the South made by coastal trained photographers who came to the South to make work of this place in the country that’s so intrinsically connected to folk history or activism through pointing towards sharecropping South and the abject poverty of the South, often what you saw in those images was the outsider who was let in. There’s also blind spots within that, but there’s moments of truth that peek out through these various things too.
I always tell students: use your influences and then walk away from them. I might be out trying to make a photograph like someone who I admire. If it’s Judith Joy Ross, or someone like Vanessa Winship, or so many countless others. But I could never make a picture like them. You also have to accept a little bit of who you are as an artist and find contentment with that because as a photographer you have artists you’re striving towards without being too referential where it just completely becomes obvious. But I think that is one of the interesting things about photography, that we’re all in a way borrowing from each other and also working in conversation.
