Observer Artist Interviews: Photographer Rahim Fortune

Photographer Rahim Fortune 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. “I tend to lean into the intensity,” he once said. Fortune’s monograph, I Can’t Stand to See You Cry, published in 2022, was nominated for the Paris Photo-Aperture Photobook of the Year and won the Rencontres d’Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award in 2022. This was followed in 2024 by Hardtack, which earned him a nomination for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize this year, with accompanying work on view at The Photographers’ Gallery in London through June 2025.

His exhibition “Reflections” 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, James Van Der Zee, Roy DeCarava and P. H. Polk, selected from Greenberg’s archives. This fall, the exhibition will travel to The University of Texas’ Art Galleries at Black Studies, an on-campus space showcasing art of the African diaspora.

We spoke with Fortune about Black photographic lineage, not framing his subjects “virtuously” and the shortcomings of the fashion world.

What should people know about your path to becoming a photographer?

I got into photography as an extension of music and skateboarding—two 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, the Magnum photographer, who really inspired me and showed me what was possible with the medium. I wasn’t 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 and Mike Brodie, and they just completely opened up my mind.

“Reflections” is posited as “documentary photography with personal history”—how do these two genres overlap, for you?

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

Do you think visuals can have a palliative effect, relative to loss and grief?

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, about my mother’s family. My mother passed by suicide in 2007, and the Oklahoma suicide rate is double the national average. That’s not not 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’s 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’s family. It was really just this isolated thing that happened to me and my sister.

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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’ve 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’s one thing that I also go to other people’s work for.

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’t grasp from existing myths or misperceptions? 

That’s a thing that I try to avoid. I really don’t try to force the social-political element of the work. That’s for others to interpret. I find that to frame yourself that way is virtuous. To center a prejudice, and then to say you’re going to shift it, you’re then implying that your subjects need you to change their perception of how they’re viewed. There’s a great quote from Walker Evans, he says [loosely]: “that’s the job of propaganda, not art photography, to change people’s minds and sentiments.” I don’t know that I take on that responsibility. Also, there’s 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?

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? 

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—you could have had Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother.” Even the DeCarava print that’s in the show is an original from the 50s. It’s like $50,000—it’s a unique object.

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, and they have a lot of Rogovin’s 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.

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?

First and foremost, I’m 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.

The book, as a form, is what established your series. Showing the edit at Howard Greenberg, how does exhibiting provide a separate viewer experience? 

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, 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’re painstakingly printed with silver gelatin, and that’s a different experience from seeing the tritone plates in the book. Sometimes, printed details that weren’t prominent become prominent at that size.

I read in a previous interview that you have a body of work in color in process. Could you talk about that?

Yes, I’m working in color. I’m interested in that mostly out of a need not to repeat myself. It came as a commission through Aperture. They’re working on a book that’s going to engage the Texas African American Pictures Archive. It’s about 10,000 objects dating back to daguerreotypes and tintypes all the way through the 1980s. They’re 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, 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.

You recently collaborated with Bottega Veneta—was it challenging or liberating having a commission that’s so outside of the sensitivity that you bring to your other work? 

I’ve 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’t completely out of my wheelhouse. As a commission, it was incredible; I was really happy with that film. That was my first big campaign that I directed. It was also Matt [Blazy, who moved on to Chanel]’s last collection with Bottega, which was special. Hopefully, Chanel calls. I’m not opposed to it, but I think it has to be tasteful.

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’t really go back to fine art—like you use all of that interest up in the fashion world. It’s a tricky balance. And the fashion world is peculiar; I’m figuring out where I fit in with it. I mean, I’m 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’m figuring out if that’s even something that I want to put myself through.

A lot of my work is about trial and error. I found I’ve had some trouble with fashion, because fashion is about getting it perfect every time. In general, where you don’t have a world of producers and casting agents, you are going to constantly come up short. I just went on a trip—I 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’re expected to nail it. I’m still very much interested and will continue to shoot fashion editorials. But I don’t think that, you know, the fashion world is beating down the door.