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Scary Southern Scapes
Photography professor explores “murder ballad” sites
Kristine Potter has been capturing the light from myriad angles with her lens for many years.
Dark Waters, her second monograph, features a dark and brooding series that reflects on the Gothic landscape of the American South, as evoked in the popular imagination of “murder ballads” from the 19th and 20th centuries.
In a New York Times Book Review piece titled “To Enter This Place Alone Is to Take a Risk,” Nashville author Margaret Renkl wrote that Potter’s book “upends the tradition altogether” by showcasing where the crimes immortalized in the songs can take place — and often have.
“The landscapes in these photographs are not so much threatening as bereft of protection,” Renkl wrote.
“In the South, our most isolated places are at once the most beautiful and the most blood-soaked, and Ms. Potter understands that women are in no way the sole victims of this violent legacy.”
Potter’s seductive, richly detailed black-and-white images channel the setting and characters of these songs, capturing the landscape and creating evocative portraits that stand in for the often-unnamed women at the center of their stories.
A recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography, Potter teaches in MTSU’s Department of Media Arts as an assistant professor of Photography. She earned her Master of Fine Arts from Yale University and displayed her creativity in MTSU’s 2022 Photography Faculty Exhibition.
In 2021, her work was included in But Still, It Turns, an exhibition and book curated by Paul Graham that launched at the International Center of Photography in New York and traveled to France’s prestigious Rencontres d’Arles festival in 2022. Potter, whose monograph Manifest was published in 2018, also is the 2019–20 recipient of the Grand Prix Images Vevey.
Her work explores masculine archetypes, the American landscape, and cultural tendencies toward mythologizing the past. In her original “Dark Waters” collection, Potter used video, photographs, and sound to depict threatening waters and the people around them and investigated a feedback loop between nature and myth: how a threatening landscape primes a culture for violence, and a violent culture projects threat onto a landscape.
The book, issued in 2023 with text by Brooklyn-based author Rebecca Bengal, features 63 images of places like Murder Creek, Bloody Fork, and Deadman’s Pond, which are haunted by both the victim and perpetrator of violence in the world Potter conjures.
View Potter's work at kristinepotter.com
