Rahim Fortune

Rahim Fortune (born 1994, in Austin, Texas) is an American artist whose photographic practice explores American identity, migration, family history, landscape, and the intertwined experiences of Black and Indigenous communities in the American South. Working across photography, portraiture, landscape, and photobook-making, Fortune examines memory, resettlement, grief, and cultural continuity through intimate documentary observation, poetic sequencing, and images that move between personal history and broader social narrative.  Fortune is a self-taught photographer. His work often engages family archive, social history, regional landscape, and community memory, using black-and-white and color photography, serial image-making, and the photobook form to consider loss, care, belonging, and the ways history is carried through people and place. His projects frequently focus on Texas, Oklahoma, and the wider American South, foregrounding the emotional and historical textures of everyday life rather than spectacle.  His work has been exhibited at the California African American Museum, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and the University of Texas, and it is held in collections including the High Museum of Art, LUMA Arles, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He received the Rencontres d’Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award in 2022, and his book I Can’t Stand to See You Cry was nominated for the Paris Photo–Aperture Photobook of the Year award. Rahim Fortune lives and works between Austin, Texas, and Brooklyn, New York.