Rahim Fortune: “Hardtack” and Other Stories
Rahim Fortune, Home and Windmill, Hutto, Texas, 2022. Silver gelatin print, 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sasha Wolf Projects © Rahim Fortune
Rahim Fortune: “Hardtack” and Other Stories
September 12 – December 6, 2025
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 photobooks 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.
Kaila T. Schedeen, Curator
About Rahim Fortune
Rahim Fortune, born 1994, is a visual artist from the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. He uses photography to ask fundamental questions about American identity. Focusing on the narratives of individual families and communities, he explores shifting geographies of migration and resettlement and the way that these histories are written on the landscapes of Texas and the American South. Fortune’s book, I Can’t Stand to See You Cry, was published by Loose Joints in 2021 and was nominated for the Paris Photo-Aperture Photobook of the Year and the winner of the Rencontres d'Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award 2022. His 2024 Monograph, Hardtack (Loose Joints), has garnered international attention, earning a nomination for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2025. His work has been featured in exhibitions worldwide and in many permanent collections, including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, LUMA Arles, France, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The Virginia Museum of Art, Richmond, The Nelson Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO and the Boston Museum of Fine Art.
Artist website: https://www.rahimfortune.com/