“People have been striving to create something removed from its time, something that is wilfully nostalgic. Even in the ’40s, they were trying to call back ‘the good old days’ so I used that language deliberately in Hardtack,” says Fortune. In his hands, timelessness becomes a reprieve from the onslaught of progress’s clammy grip. In Fortune’s photographs, mobile phones disappear without a trace, modernity nothing more than a fever dream from which you awake to cowboys, kerosene lamps, rustic barns, praise ceremonies, and handmade quilts.
Although the photographs feel timeless, they do not feel old. Rather than contain the wisdom of ancestors passed from one generation to the next, the recipes endure because they are closely tied to survival. Within that lineage, Fortune finds his place alongside groundbreaking Black American photographers including the aforementioned Parks, James Van Der Zee, Roy DeCarava, and Prentice H. Polke, whose pictures are shown alongside his in a second smaller room at the gallery.
Working across portraiture, documentary, still life, and landscape, Fortune crafts scenes that unfold through the panoramic sweep of Black American history, embedded in the earth itself. “So much of Oklahoma where I grew up, and where my family is native to, was a memory, and now there are people in midtown Manhattan looking at pictures of these places,” Fortune says. “There is a reverence or visibility to it that I think is healing. It’s a lot better than it just being trapped inside of you.”
