Black Frontiers: Rahim Fortune and Nicole R. Fleetwood in Conversation
Please join Aperture and the Photography Program at Parsons School of Design at the New School for a special conversation between artist Rahim Fortune and curator Nicole R. Fleetwood. The two will discuss Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive (Aperture and Documentary Arts, 2026) and Fortune’s vivid new photographic essay that takes up the archive’s legacy and places it firmly in the present tense.
Kinship & Community presents an inspiring example of collective self-representation from the final decades of official segregation in the United States. With more than 150 images of everyday Black life—created by Black photographers for Black communities across Texas—this collection celebrates a proud but overlooked regional culture while testifying to the power of photography as a social tool.
This event is free and open to the public. RSVP is required, please register here.
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Image: Rahim Fortune, Prairie View Homecoming Parade, Prairie View, Texas, 2024; from Kinship & Community: Selections from the Texas African American Photography Archive (Aperture, 2026). © 2026 Rahim Fortune
Rahim Fortune is a photographer from Austin, Texas, and the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma. His books include Hardtack (Loose Joints, 2024) and I can’t stand to see you cry (Loose Joints, 2021), which was nominated for the Paris Photo–Aperture Photobook of the Year and winner of the Rencontres d’Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award. He was shortlisted for the 2025 Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.
Nicole Fleetwood is the Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. A MacArthur Fellow, she is a writer, curator, and art critic interested in Black art, cultural history, aesthetics, photography, and documentary studies. She is the author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (2020), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and she curated an exhibition of the same name for MoMA PS1. She was also the guest editor of Aperture magazine’s Spring 2018 issue “Prison Nation.”
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