Dark Waters.

Photographs by Kristine Potter. Contribution by Rebecca Bengal.

Aperture, New York, USA, 2023. English, 136 pp., 1x11½x¼".

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2023 by:

Cheryl Van Hooven

In this dark and brooding series, Potter reflects on the natural environment of the Southern United States as illustrated in the popular imagination of “murder ballads” from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her seductive, richly detailed black-and-white images channel the setting and characters of these songs, capturing the Southern landscape, and creating a series of evocative portraits that stand in for the oft-unnamed women at the center of their stories. In the American murder ballad, a genre that has taken on cult appeal and continues to be rerecorded in contemporary music, lyrics frequently describe the riverscape as a stage for crimes. In the world that Potter conjures, actual places, with names such as Murder Creek, Bloody Fork, and Deadman’s Pond, are haunted by both the victim and perpetrator of violence, alluding to the causal glamorization of violence against women still prevalent in society. As Potter notes, “I see a through line of violent exhibitionism, from those early murder ballads, to the Wild West shows, to the contemporary landscape of cinema and television. Culturally, we seem to require it.” Dark Waters both induces and exorcises the sense of threat that women often contend with as they move through the world. Author Rebecca Bengal draws upon her own cultural references of the South, contributing a short story that underscores the essence of anxiety and foreboding that Potter infuses into each of her images.

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Cat# AP732H Hardbound $65.00 (978-1-59711-556-8)
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