Pearl, 2019

Aperture is pleased to offer this very special limited-edition print by Kristine Potter on the occasion of the publication of Dark Waters, copublished by Aperture with Images Vevey and The Momentary. 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 the American murder ballad, which has taken on cult appeal and continue to be rerecorded even to this day, the riverscape is frequently the stage of crimes as described in their lyrics. Places like Murder Creek, Bloody Fork, and Deadman’s Pond are haunted by both the victim and perpetrator of violence in the world Potter conjures, reflecting the casual and popular glamorization of violence against women that remains prevalent in today’s cultural landscape. 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.” Of this image the artist explains, Pearl is one of the eleven studio portraits punctuating the Dark Waters book. Each of these images is named after female victims from well-known murder ballads. These revisionist portraits emphasize the imaginative nature of the project overall, pulling the reader into the realm of the female psyche to consider how the stories we've been told (the songs we've been sung, or the movies we have watched) influence the ways in which we move through this world. Pearl is a bit of an outlier among these portraits, being the only figure that turns away from the viewer. She recedes into the darkness, unknowable, but very much alive." Dark Waters both evokes and exorcises the sense of threat and foreboding that women often grapple with as they move through the world. Author Rebecca Bengal contributes an evocative short story that underscores the sense of anxiety and foreboding that Potter infuses into each of her images; a deliciously compelling, if chilling, combination.

Archival pigment print, printed by the artist.
Image Size: 14.8 x 18.5 inches
Paper Size: 16 x 20 inches
Edition of 15 + 3 Artist Proofs
Signed and numbered by the artist

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. Her work is represented by Sasha Wolff Projects.