Rahim Fortune maps memory, land, and Black life across the American South.
21 April 2026
Fortune composes a quiet yet resonant cartography of Black life, where landscape and lineage fold into one another with lyrical precision. Presented by the California African American Museum in collaboration with Art + Practice, and curated by Center for Photography at Woodstock, this Los Angeles debut situates Fortune’s practice within an expanded dialogue on history, place, and photographic inheritance.
Working across black-and-white and colour photography, alongside a contemplative film, Fortune traces the fragile architectures of memory embedded in the rural South. His images move between intimacy and expanse: portraits of kin and community, open terrains marked by absence and endurance, and details that hold the weight of lived experience.
Drawing from his ‘Hardtack’ series and newly commissioned works responding to the Texas African American Photography Archive, Fortune’s lens resists spectacle in favour of care. What emerges is a meditation on American identity that is both personal and collective, shaped by grief, inheritance, and the search for home.
Here, photography becomes an act of return. Not to a fixed past, but to a continuum where memory is held, contested, and reimagined.
This exhibition is on view at the California African American Museum until 5 September 2026.
