Praise dancing, a response to the biblical injunction to “Praise him with dancing and tambourines!”, is deep-rooted in Baptist and Pentecostal churches in the American south. Rahim Fortune took this picture of praise dancers in the town of Edna, Texas in 2020. It was part of a series focusing on the family of a young creative director, Chasidy Chevonne, for a book project in which Chevonne reflected on Black womanhood and the lives of the women she grew up among. The photographs were originally released to mark Juneteenth – the federal US holiday commemorating the end of slavery – a month after the murder of George Floyd in May that year; they were intended “as a form of visual healing”. Texas had been the last state to hear the Emancipation Proclamation, in 1865.
Rahim Fortune has been photographing in the southern states for the past six years; his work, including this picture, will feature in the inaugural PhotoFairs exhibition in New York next month. His pictures often examine different elements of his own heritage – his father was an African American living in Austin, Texas and his mother part of the Chickasaw Nation in Oklahoma. He thinks of his photographs as “a love letter to the place I grew up in” and a series that speaks to the “mythic quality of culture” in the American south-east. As well as his praise dancers, Fortune’s work celebrates blues musicians and rodeo queens, tracing the contributions of Black and Native American traditions to contemporary Americana and folklore. His ambition, he says, is to produce a body of work that can “ascend [beyond] any narrative around rural Black identity in America as one of simply servitude or oppression. Rather, I intend to highlight the boundless creativity and possibilities of the music and people who still contribute to this culture.”
