Hardtack by Rahim Fortune, made from 2016 through 2023 across Texas, Oklahoma, and the American South, portrays Black Southern communities, traditions, and landscapes marked by history.
The project extends Fortune's earlier family-centered work into a broader inquiry into kinship, grief, and place. After the deaths of both parents, he felt an urgency to collect stories and entered the spaces he photographed as a friend, participant, or extended family member. The title refers to the durable flour-and-water ration associated with the Civil War, linking survival and migration to the endurance of Black culture after emancipation.
That inquiry takes shape through portraits of bull riders, praise dancers, pageant queens, cowboys, parents, and children, interwoven with churches, storefronts, demolished schools, fields, and highways. The black-and-white sequence shifts among close details, social gatherings, interiors, roadside views, and broad landscapes. The mood moves between intimacy, ceremony, and reflection.
Most photographs were made on film in 6 × 7 format, a material approach Fortune links to the history of Black community photography. He generally left clothing and self-presentation to his subjects, allowing planning, modest direction, chance, and movement to coexist.
The project made its public debut in Pace Gallery's nine-part presentation at Paris Photo in 2022, before expanding to include photographs from 2023. Published by Loose Joints in 2024, Hardtack was nominated for the 2024 Rencontres d'Arles Author Book Awards and shortlisted for the 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, with the work subsequently featured in the prize exhibition at The Photographers' Gallery in London. Further presentations included Howard Greenberg Gallery's Reflections, a University of Texas at Austin survey, and an exhibition at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. The International Center of Photography also selected the book for its 2026 Photobooks USA 2000-25 exhibition.
