Visiting Artist Lecture | Rahim Fortune

Speaker Name: Rahim Fortune
Speaker’s Website: Artist website

Banner image: Cover image of I Can’t Stand to See You Cry, photobook by Rahim Fortune, 2021.

Rahim Fortune’s visit to the Lamar Dodd School of Art coincides with his inclusion in a major exhibition of Southern photography at the High Museum in Atlanta this fall titled A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845 (Sept. 15, 2023 – Jan. 14, 2024). The title of his lecture — “Complex interiority: New visions of the south” — is taken from an essay he penned in the High Museum’s forthcoming monograph published by Aperture.

Rahim will follow his visit to the Dodd with a public dialogue at the High Museum on October 19 titled “Picturing America: Rahim Fortune and Gregory Harris in Conversation”. Friends and alumni of the Dodd who reside in and around Atlanta are encouraged to attend!

The Visiting Artist and Scholar Lecture series has brought over 80 distinguished guests to the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia since 2002. Visiting Artists and Scholars spend three days on campus interacting with students and faculty, the culmination of which is a public lecture on the subject of the artist’s or scholar’s work.

Artist bio

Rahim Fortune (b.1994) uses photography to ask fundamental questions about American identity. Focusing on the narratives of individual families and communities, he explores shifting geographies of migration and resettlement, and the way that these histories are written on the landscapes of Texas and the American South.

Rahim has published two books of his photographs. His work has been featured in exhibitions worldwide and is included in many permanent collections, including those of the High Museum in Atlanta GA, The LUMA Arles, Nelson Atkins Museum and The Boston Museum of Fine Art.

“Fortune’s calm and striking photographs provide a compelling glimpse into the daily rhythms of the community, revealing its deep humanity and dignity, at a time when his own personal pain resonated with the experience of the nation. But his images also capture the pain, tensions and relentless everyday reality that have influenced the lives of these people. His portraits are so grippingly engaging because he finds the necessary balance between thoughtful compassion and hard truth.” – Collector Daily