Fall 2025 Library Highlight: Hardtack
Rahim Fortune
American, born 1994
Hardtack
London: Loose Joints, 2024.
First Edition.
Rahim Fortune’s Hardtack is a sustained meditation on endurance, inheritance, and place in the American South. The title – drawn from a Civil War-era survival food made from flour, water, and salt – serves as a metaphor for the persistence of Black culture and tradition amid changing landscapes. Photographed across Texas and Oklahoma over nearly a decade, Hardtack weaves portraits and landscapes into a quiet chronicle of community life. Young bull riders, praise dancers, and pageant queens appear alongside elders and family members, each participating in the rhythms of community. Fortune’s black-and-white photographs are patient and precise, locating beauty in ordinary gestures and the trace of time upon the land.
The work borrows from vernacular and archival photography to question how Black communities have been seen—and have seen themselves—through the medium’s history. Fortune’s landscapes are not background but living records, sites where migration, memory, and survival intersect. Measured in tone and restrained in design, Hardtack extends Fortune’s dialogue between personal and collective memory begun in I Can’t Stand to See You Cry. It stands as both document and love letter, a portrait of a region that endures through its people, their rituals, and their unwavering connection to the land.
