Impulse Magazine: Editor's Selections

In Reflections, Rahim Fortune turns ten years of documentary photography into a meditation on memory, regional identity, and cultural inheritance. The exhibition, curated in collaboration with Sasha Wolf Projects, pairs two of Fortune’s poignant series—Hardtack and I Can’t Stand to See You Cry—with selected works by Black photographers from the gallery’s collection. Fortune’s framing is both personal and political. Hardtack—named after a shelf-stable cracker eaten by Buffalo Soldiers—threads metaphor and metaphorical endurance into portraits of Black communal life in Texas. He draws on vernacular and community photographic lineages not simply as inspiration but as modes of resistance and self-determination: “Communities [have long used] photography to document joyous moments, to mark time, and to create their own story.”

 

April 21, 2025