Kristine Potter Reflects on the Southern Gothic Landscape

Arts Editor

"Caroline," Kristine Potter

Photographer Kristine Potter is interested in how the South is perceived — not the artifice of rhinestones and cowboy boots, but haunted landscapes, murder balladry and the women whose deaths inspire the songs.

Potter, who was born in Dallas and raised in Georgia, moved to Nashville in 2018. Before that she was in New York, where she’d lived since finishing graduate school at Yale. Even before moving back down South, Potter was investigating the relationship between landscape and violence. Her first monograph, Manifest (published by TBW in 2018), explores the consequences of Manifest Destiny. Dark Waters continues that exploration, but focuses on the uniquely macabre intersection of murder ballads and Southern bodies of water with violent names. She began shooting landscapes of East Tennessee.

Kristine Potter: Dark Waters

Aperture

136 pages, $65

Potter will discuss Dark Waters 6-8 p.m. Wednesday, June 28, at The Green Ray, 3237 Gallatin Pike

"The hollers of Appalachia are filled with a very specific kind of energy," Potter says. "It seems to me both like slightly ominous, but also totally magical — and extraordinarily beautiful."

"Dark Water," Kristine Potter

Potter considers technological advances in photography to be central to this work. She shot most of the landscapes during the summer and early fall because she wanted the forest's canopy to be grown over — not bare trees and well-lit scenery, but dark and moody landscapes befitting names like Bloody Fork and Murder Creek. Photographic technology allowed her to capture these vistas with a new kind of clarity.

"We have cameras now that can allow us to see in the dark, really sharply," Potter explains. "And it's a relatively new feature to be able to do this well. When you think about the history of Southern landscape photography, so much of it relies on this kind of haze — this interpretive haze — which comes from the materials that are being used. And while they’re extraordinary, I’ve always been interested in describing everything. I think there's nothing more mysterious than a fact well-described. So now, we can really do that with some of these newer digital cameras. That was just a really attractive notion to me — to get deep into a dark landscape and make it sharp.

"You could argue, to some degree, that the ways in which we’ve seen the South are part of the ways in which we expect to see the South," she continues. "There's room for new description, and I wonder if that room isn't about obscuring, but rather not obscuring. It's about seeing everything."

"Knoxville Girl," Kristine Potter

Punctuating the landscape photos are portraits of women — soaking wet, as if they’ve just risen from the waters. "Knoxville Girl" was the first studio portrait Potter made for the series. In it, a girl in a white lace blouse — the kind with round, fabric-covered buttons and permanent creases from years of ironing — wrings out her wet hair with two hands, holding an intense gaze straight at the camera with no hint of mercy. Further into the book, the lyrics to an old Appalachian murder ballad of the same name suggest the woman's story: "She fell down on her bended knees / For mercy she did cry / ‘Oh, Willy dear, don't kill me here / I’m unprepared to die!’" The words are printed in dainty italics, with lines that strike through the violent bits of imagery. Murder ballads are an important part of Dark Waters, and the idea that they would be incorporated into the book was never a question. But partially erasing — or at least obscuring — the violence in the songs dissolves some of their power.

Because it is a book of photography, it was uniquely challenging for Dark Waters to incorporate performance. Still, the tension between Southern landscapes and violent murder ballads was always the crux of the project. Potter braids musical performance throughout the book, beginning with the cover, which shows a drape of heavy green velvet — like a curtain you’d pull back as a performance begins. Photographs of balladeers playing their instruments bookend the series, and you can imagine the curtain opening just as the music starts.

The book ends with a short story by Rebecca Bengal titled "Blood Harmony," which is every bit as haunting and evocative as the photographs. It's an afterword that points at a lack of conclusion — like the scene at the end of a horror film that shows that the monster hadn't really been killed after all, and is going to keep coming back.

In late April, a group of women gathered around a fire in an East Nashville backyard. They passed around chocolate cupcakes, wine and Topo Chi…

Arts Editor