Flour, water, and salt: the ingredients of hardtack, a Civil War–era staple built for endurance and long journeys. Rahim Fortune takes that name for a decade of photographs made across the American South, where the food’s associations with survival and migration become a way of thinking about Black communities that have held their ground through emancipation’s unfinished aftermath. The book gathers nearly ten years of portraiture rooted in specific places—sites of historical and cultural weight that guide the work without becoming its subject. What emerges is not a survey of landmarks but a study of continuity: how particular grounds and particular people remain bound to one another.
At the centre of Hardtack are coming-of-age rituals. Young bull-riders, praise dancers, and pageant queens appear in portraits that register discipline, rigour, and creative flair without diminishing the pleasure of performance. Fortune photographs these traditions alongside the elders who pass them down, so that the book’s intergenerational conversations are both its subject and its method. His dignifying eye treats community ritual as inheritance rather than spectacle—an approach that connects these images to the vernacular and archival photographic languages he draws on while interrogating his community’s long and complicated relationship to the camera.
Collecting the work over 144 pages and 72 tritone plates, Hardtack follows Fortune’s earlier monograph I can’t stand to see you cry and extends his weaving of documentary and personal history. The sequence moves between landscape and portrait, public ritual and private belonging, allowing the South to appear as a region that has nourished the artist personally and creatively. Imani Perry contributes a text, and Sarah Chaplin Espenon edited the volume for Loose Joints, which designed and published it as a section-sewn clothbound debossed hardcover. For collectors attuned to photography of the American South, the book’s significance lies in this sustained attention: a decade’s commitment to a place and its people, and to the photographic languages through which both are honoured.
