Join the High Museum of Art for a conversation with photographer Rahim Fortune and Gregory Harris, Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography. They will take the stage to discuss Fortune’s creative practice and his work on view in the exhibition A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845. Following the conversation, Fortune will sign copies of A Long Arc: Photography and the American South (Aperture, 2023).
The South is perhaps the most mythologized region in the United States and also one of the most depicted. Since the dawn of photography in the nineteenth century, photographers have articulated the distinct and evolving character of the South’s people, landscape, and culture and reckoned with its fraught history. Many of the urgent questions we face today about what defines the American experience—from racism, poverty, and the legacy of slavery to environmental disaster, immigration, and the changes wrought by a modern, global economy—appear as key themes in the photography of the South. The visual history of the South is inextricably intertwined with the history of photography and also the history of America, and is therefore an apt lens through which to examine American identity.
RSVP is required to attend this conversation.
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Rahim Fortune (born 1994, Texas) is a photographer who lives and works between Austin, Texas, and Brooklyn, New York. Focusing on the narratives of individual families and communities, Fortune explores shifting geographies of migration and resettlement and the way that these histories are written on the landscapes of Texas and the American South. His work has been featured in exhibitions worldwide and is included in collections at several institutions including the High Museum of Art, LUMA Arles, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Gregory Harris is the Donald and Marilyn Keough Family Curator of Photography at the High Museum of Art. He is a specialist in contemporary photography with a particular interest in documentary practice. Since joining the High in 2016, Harris has curated over a dozen exhibitions including A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845, Evelyn Hofer: Eyes on the City, and Look Again: 40 Years of Collecting Photographs, as well as solo shows with Thomas Struth, Paul Graham, and Amy Elkins. He has also contributed essays to monographs by Matthew Brandt, Paul D’Amato, Amy Elkins, Jill Frank, and the Metabolic Studio. He holds a BFA in photography from Columbia College Chicago and an MA in art history from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
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