Publicity: Rahim Fortune
Art Director Gem Fletcher talks to photographer Rahim Fortune about his new book, I Can't Stand to See You Cry and his explorations of family and the past during the pandemic
For Rahim Fortune, the photo book is a place for intimate encounters. To unravel the aspects of life, we hold most sacred and contain complex and often contradicting emotions that ruminate deep inside.
In Oklahoma, a project split into two self-published volumes, the photographer revisits the Chickasaw Nations, where his family ancestry goes back generations. On the way of the insider / outsider, he describes the little daily nuances of life in rural Oklahoma.
Landscapes and relationships are characterized by the passage of time, familiar and distant at the same time. Happiness frames the trees he climbed as a child and details in his grandmother's house. He cancels feelings of absence, memory and remembrance and at the same time regains the freedom of choice about his life story. "The camera acted as a buffer between me and the reckoning of visiting my mother's resting place, who died a decade earlier," said Fortune. “I wanted to have proof of a world that nobody really knew about. Even within my family, nobody goes to Oklahoma. I am interested in preserving this story and in connecting with it. "
For the T magazine
For the i-D magazine
Last year has been a challenge for the photographer who divides his time between Austin and New York. A long list of career milestones collided with a profound personal tragedy compounded by the pressures of a global pandemic and an urgent movement for social justice.