Join Aperture and the International Center of Photography for a book signing with Kristine Potter and Rebecca Bengal to celebrate both of their recent publications, Dark Waters and Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists. This book signing will follow an Aperture PhotoBook Club Event on August 16.
Dark Waters, Kristine Potter’s second monograph, continues her engagement with the American landscape as a palimpsest for cultural ideologies. In this dark and brooding series, Potter reflects on the Southern Gothic landscape as evoked 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 landscape of the American South, and creating a series of evocative portraits that stand in for the oft-unnamed women at the center of their stories.
In Strange Hours, Rebecca Bengal considers the photographers who have defined our relationship to the medium. Through generous essays and interviews, she contemplates photography’s narrative power, from the radical intimacy of Nan Goldin’s New York demimonde to Justine Kurland’s pictures of rebel girls on the open road, bringing us closer to pioneering artists and the personal and political stories surrounding their images.
This event is presented in partnership with the International Center of Photography.
Kristine Potter (born in Dallas, 1977) is an artist based in Nashville. She holds a BFA in photography; a BA in art history from the University of Georgia; and an MFA in photography from Yale University. 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, New York, before traveling to the Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, in 2022. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2018) and the Grand Prix Images Vevey (2019–20). Manifest, her first monograph, was published in 2018. Potter is currently an assistant professor of photography at Middle Tennessee State University.
Rebecca Bengal is a writer of fiction, essays, and documentary journalism about art, literature, film, music, and the environment. A regular contributor to Aperture, her writing has been published in the Paris Review, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, Oxford American, Southwest Review, the Believer, the Guardian, and the Criterion Collection. A MacDowell fellow in fiction and a former editor at Vogue, Bengal holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin. Originally from western North Carolina, Bengal lives in Brooklyn.
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Image: Kristine Potter, Balladeer 1, 2022; from Kristine Potter: Dark Waters (Aperture, 2023). © 2023 Kristine Potter
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