TEXAS HOLD'EM
by Makeda Easter
Rahim Fortune, Prairie View Homecoming Parade, Prairie View, Texas, 2024.
(Rahim Fortune / Sasha Wolf Projects)
I was raised in Houston, and after detours in LA and Chicago, I find myself in Houston once again. For me, Texas’s biggest city is muggy nights, shrimp and grits for breakfast, Beyoncé and Megan Thee Stallion, an annual excursion to the Rodeo, and a Black cowboy on horse, trotting along a deserted city road.
Two exhibitions currently on view at Art + Practice, organized by the Center for Photography at Woodstock, and co-presented with the California African American Museum, do a remarkable job of capturing Black life in Texas. Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive and Rahim Fortune: Between a Memory and Me both avoid the tropes for something deeper.
Kinship & Community pulls from an archive of more than 60,000 photographs, featuring images by photographers across East Texas from 1944 to 1984. The show highlights the everyday: a group of boys in deep concentration during a game of dominoes at a Dallas YMCA in 1947, smiling children playing hand games, and a formal military portrait from 1965. It also chronicles the movement for Civil Rights in neighborhoods and rural towns, through photos of marches and political organizing at churches and community centers.
I was captivated by Family Reunion, a 1955 gelatin silver print by Alonzo Jordan, a community photographer who operated a photo studio and barbershop in Jasper, Texas for 41 years. In Family Reunion, six people with their arms lovingly wrapped around one another smile at the camera and at each other. As I leaned in to get a closer look at the details — the floral wallpaper, their dapper outfits, taper candles, and an untouched cake atop a long table — I felt nostalgic for my family photos.
Rodney Evans, Photography Students, Texas Southern University, Houston, Texas, 1961.
(Texas African Americn Photography Archive)
The archival exhibit leads seamlessly into Fortune’s show, which includes a short film co-created with visual artist Dé Randle meditating on the Texas landscape. Fortune, a photographer and musician, was raised between Austin and the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma (where his mother was a citizen). He’s spent the past decade documenting community gatherings across Texas including rodeos, parades, and other regional events. Between a Memory and Me combines black-and-white work from his 2024 project Hardtack and new color photographs commissioned by the arts non-profits Aperture and Documentary Arts, made in response to the Texas African American Photography Archive.
Fortune told me his black-and-white photographs feel removed from time. He chose color to “underline the contemporary nature of my work and not have them compete with these historical images.” Even before his commission, Fortune had studied the archive through the 1996 book Portraits of Community: African American Photography in Texas. He was inspired by the role Black photographers played in their communities, serving as a link between commercial work and “capital A art.” And in the vast state of Texas, the ways in which these photographers’ work were connected, but also created in isolation.
“Texas has always been the subject of my photographs,” he told me. “It’s where I grew up. It’s where I currently live. I spend hours and hours driving around the state, photographing people and regional music and regional fashion.”
Rahim Fortune's images capture daily life and quotidian scenes in Texas. (Joshua White)
I was particularly drawn to Grandma’s Hands (2020), a black-and-white close-up of well-manicured, well-lived hands resting gently against a swooping-patterned dress. The “Grandma” in the picture is the grandmother of Fortune’s friend, stylist Chasidy Chevonne, a Houston native. It’s part of a series of photographs he made of Chevonne’s family over one summer. Her mother figures in another photo, Praise Dancers (2020), a movement tradition rooted in the spirituality of Southern Black churches.
Deep collaboration is an essential part of Fortune’s creative process, which blends documentary and fantasy. “So often when people talk about the Black experience within Texas, the racial violence is such a prominent thing,” he said. “The idea was always to allow for the people within my photographs to be the main characters of our own noir-retelling of Texas. As much as there are these very troublesome histories, there’s also so much resilience.”
Fortune often returns to the same spaces and events, like the annual homecoming parade at Prairie View A&M University, about an hour outside of Houston. He’s not drawn to the “gotcha moment” or “exposing what people would call an ‘ugly truth.’” He sees his work as an energetic exchange between himself and the stars of his photos. “At the center of what I’m interested in is a kind of beauty that merges with photography — how do you make a photograph more dramatic than something that’s already so dramatic?”
That sense of care was just one thread tying the two exhibitions together, a continuum of Black life in the Deep South. In it, I saw my own history, my own experiences as a Black Texan reflected back to me.
I asked Fortune how he hopes Angelenos connect to his work. He spoke about the Second Great Migration beginning in the 1940s, the movement of Black people fleeing racial violence in the Deep South for opportunities out West. “It’s a natural fit as anywhere for it to travel,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there are some distant relatives making their way into the show.”
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Rahim Fortune: Between a Memory and Me and Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive are on view at Art + Practice through September 5th; artandpractice.org.
Makeda Easter’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times. She is the author of a forthcoming book on roller skating to be published by Hachette Book Group.
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