From the summer of 2024 through the winter of 2025, Rahim Fortune made Between a Memo1y and Me, a series of photographs depicting various community events and gatherings across Texas. He was responding to the images and histories represented in the Texas African American Photography Archive through a commission by Documentary Arts, the Dallas-based nonprofit and copublisher of the book Kinship_& Community. Drawing together more than 150 images of everyday Black life-created by Black photographers for Black communities across Texas-the volume celebrates a proud but overlooked regional culture while testifying to the power of photography as a social tool.
Fortune's vivid new images take up the archive's legacy and place it firmly in the present tense. In his series, Fortune hoped to strike a balance between showing both youth and elders in landscapes that felt familiar to him, and the resulting images spark conversations across generations about the broader relationship people have with the land. "I am thinking about how memory functions concerning image and sound," he says, "and how it may be all we have to hold on to in the face of loss." Raised between Austin and the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma-"on about a seven-hour strip of the IH-35," as he puts it-Fortune has a deep reverence for the community photographers in Texas who photographed local events and pursued a level of excellence in their printing, among them Earlie Hudnall Jr. In this conversation with Alan Govenar, Fortune speaks about family heartbreak, blues music, and the meaning of truth in photography.