When I first saw Small Soldiers in 1998, I knew I wanted the life of Gregory Smith’s character — sans the murderous, pint-sized action figures that terrorized his neighborhood. He was just a kid who worked at his father’s toy store, propping up displays of Commando Elites and Gorgonites in heroic poses. Something about native advertising in the ’90s made it impossible to escape the draw of toys.

Like all the stuff of our childhood, we’re often taught to abandon them, to shove them away in the plastic tubs of our adult subconscious. But the toys and action figures of my youth remain an important part of my adulthood, enabling me to tap into my inner child and navigate unresolved traumas, overlooked passions, and the little things that remind me to be happy.

Toy photography is a robust hobby with a special kind of community, and I first encountered the art in 2016. Social media helped me discover the wildly imaginative work of Mitchel Wu, an LA-based photographer whose portfolio boasted some of the most dynamic images of toys and action figures I’d only seen for the first time. Using both the natural and artificial world around him, Wu arranges a tapestry of engaging subjects in startling detail.

From Ant-Man running atop leaves, to Hot Wheels cars jumping through actual donuts, Wu’s work inspired me to explore the world of toy photography deeper. The first step? Understanding how cameras work. My sister was well-versed in which cameras were best and how to set up a subject, so I consulted with her since I couldn’t even tell lenses apart.

I started off using blank printer paper taped to my wall and a small table for my earlier work. It was an experiment from the very start — iPhones have a portrait mode feature that I took advantage of but could never understand the way aperture worked. Snapping the first few shots on my old smartphone didn’t come out as I hoped, because the lighting didn’t complement my subjects. I had to reach out to my sister again.

I scoured eBay for an affordable Canon EOS Rebel T3i SLR camera — a product whose name was only matched by its complicated makeup. There were black knobs, red buttons, a display that popped out and could be flipped, and about a dozen other confusing features I constantly sought help understanding. There was still the issue of lighting, as well as photo editing.

The toy photography community on Instagram was especially helpful during this time. I was able to connect with hobbyists across the globe and foster a connection with people whose passions fueled their art. It also fueled my drive for collecting figures. It wasn’t until taking up toy photography that I discovered a market teeming with high-quality — and high-priced (like, really high-priced) — merchandise of some of my favorite characters.

Online storefronts like Sideshow Collectibles and Big Bad Toy Store became my go-to for news on release dates and preorders. One brand in particular, Hot Toys, set the standard for which figures looked and worked best in shoots because all their products were hand-crafted by artists who tried to meet the demands of toy photography.

I started to pursue more creative set pieces, going from Miles Morales and Peter Parker playing basketball to Eleven levitating a red truck in front of Mike and Lucas. I wanted to deconstruct scenes and characters in new ways, even using a detailed Michael Jordan figure to capture the ineffable cool that is “His Airness.”

After learning about which miniature studio lights worked best on darker figures and how to set up the lightbox I’d place them in, I decided to create a storyboard of images that relayed my journey as a Black kid navigating this pop culture landscape. I started with two figures: Rock Lee from the anime Naruto and Miles Morales from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I placed them in conversation with the head of a doll I made from clay. It was brown with dark hair and largely shaped to emphasize the space it took up.

The small project was my grappling with Black identity in anime shows, comics, and video games — spaces that don’t frequently feature us. Whenever online conversations on representation in these areas arise, they often get flooded with racist responses.

Growing up, I didn’t have Miles Morales or the same big screen T’Challa we know today. Navigating that culture through the years often felt awkward when communities weren’t receptive or inviting. It was a cathartic experience putting the storyboard together, because it was a hobby that I learned from connecting with diverse creators. It reminds me to hold strong to the joys of my youth, no matter how old I get, and it also works to remind me that I belong in those spaces.

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I like to describe my style of photography as ‘magpie meets mad scientist’. I find shiny objects and through trial and error work out how to use them to create eye-catching in-camera effects. 

I spent a lot of time during lockdown playing with this kind of thing, getting the hang of how different shapes and colors reflect and refract light, and using them to take creative (yet slightly quirky) self-portraits. Since that time, I’ve worked with lots of other faces, most recently in a new studio space that I rent with some other photographers. We share the equipment, which has allowed me
to experiment with different lighting setups. Here, I’m using a ring light and some LED panels, where I have more control over the power and colour. 

5 studio portrait tips: How to get the best out of a studio photography session

Today’s shiny objects are various beads I picked up in an arts and craft shop and strung with wire – total cost under a tenner. Like a lot of photographers, I have some kit-head tendencies, and this DIY approach fights back against the urge to buy new equipment. Sourcing or making it is usually cheaper, easier than you think, and ultimately more satisfying. 

Jack’s advice for getting creative in the studio

1: Set up your lights

Here I’m using two Neewer RGB660 Pro LED panels and a ring light. The ring light gives me a soft key light, then I’m free to experiment with the LED panels. I tend to play around with the video modes, such as police lights, which will flash red and blue, meaning I never know what I might capture. For me, this is a far more interesting process than choosing a color, where you know exactly what you’re going to get before you’ve even pressed the shutter.

The best LED light sticks and light wands for photography in 2023

2: Try this shooting setup

I shoot with a Canon EOS 80D and a Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM. This focal length is perfect for portraits, leaving a little room around the subject for placing artifacts such as beads. The 80D has an articulating screen that allows me to swivel round so I can see the shot from various positions. Sometimes I can be closer to the model when dangling beads, so I’ve found it really useful to switch to Live View and use that.

3: Focusing your subjects

I always use eye autofocus when photographing people. It’s 100% reliable, especially
if they are not moving too much and there’s a decent amount of light. On many modern cameras, you can choose Left Eye, Right Eye or Auto from the menu in advance, which leaves you free to pay more attention to composition and working
with your subjects on their mood and expressions.

4: Use objects creatively 

I originally picked up these beads and secured them together with a wire. Ideally, what I’m looking for is something reasonably translucent and colourful. The trick is to stay quite close to the lens, leaving the object out of focus, and then experimenting with various shapes while the light reflects around the image. Again, for varying results play around with this as much as possible.

5. Take your shots

I’ll mix up my shutter speeds, in certain scenarios going from 1/25 sec to 1/100 sec, and will use a shallow aperture of anywhere between f/1.4 and f/2.8. I’ll always keep my ISO low, at around 100, and will then adjust the brightness of the lighting to get the correct exposure. Shooting at speeds of 1/30 sec will let in a lot of light, so you will need to compensate elsewhere. For some motion blur, I may even move the artifacts near the lens as I shoot. 

Check out Sigma 30mm f/1.4 DC HSM Art review, be sure to look at the best lenses for portrait photography, and the best softbox lighting kits

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LONGMONT — From a seat on a low plastic stool, Marsha Steckling uses her left hand to manipulate the accessory tools of her trade: a squeeze-toy squeaker, noisemakers ranging from the low tones of a duck call to the thin hiss of a dog whistle, plus treats large and small.

In her right hand, she wields a camera, aimed toward subjects at turns curious, reticent or hammy as she waits, waits, waits for that perfect, elusive fraction of a second amid a dog’s unpredictable movements. Then the pup’s head tilts just so. The brow furrows, or the mouth drops open to suggest a smile. Or a single ear stands at attention to reveal an irresistible shade of personality.

The shutter whirs, capturing an image that soon will appear on the web site of the Longmont Humane Society and, if conditions are right, connect a human scrolling the shelter’s site or its social media accounts with an adoptable dog — and that warm, enduring bond that comes with a perfect match. 

Steckling is 14 years into this volunteer duty, offering her pro shooter’s eye to the shelter just down the highway from her Boulder base, where her business of more traditional family portraiture, including pets, keeps her busy. Several years ago, she dropped her work shooting weddings to focus more on what she loves.

“There was just something about the dog world,” she says. 

All over the country, shelters have found that when it comes to reaching their target audience of potential forever homes, quality matters. So when opportunity brings accomplished photographers like Steckling into the volunteer pool, organizations eagerly leverage that talent to produce results — both anecdotal and statistical — that outpace the relatively crude webcam or smartphone photos by intake workers that long had been the easy and affordable option.

A Poughkeepsie, New York-based nonprofit called HeARTs Speak grew from a single photographer to a national network — it counts Steckling among its members — that not only connects shelters with artists in their region, but also offers free marketing tools and basic photo instruction to enhance the odds of matchmaking.

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Some photographers realized the online images of animals coming into shelters didn’t really reflect those animals’ characteristics, says Caitlin Quinn, HeARTs Speak’s operations manager. Multiple studies have examined how photos of animals can affect the median length of stay in shelters by highlighting elements of their personality or even characteristics like coat color and ear type (floppy wins hearts).

One study, published in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, looked solely at black Labrador retriever mixes to examine the impact of photo traits, and concluded that photo quality was among the factors that shortened a dog’s shelter stay. Another found that “improved photo quality, increased direct eye contact with the camera, presence of a collar, or other accessories such as bandanas, were found to decrease the median days to adoption of shelter dogs.”

“I think this is one of the places where anecdote and data kind of meet to show us just how critical it is for people to get a window into pets in shelters,” Quinn says. “And these photos can really do that by showing their personality, and showing them in a positive light.”

Many shelters find this a helpful strategy. But in the current economic climate, it’s one that helps them barely tread water. The stay-at-home lifestyle brought on by the pandemic, which initially emptied kennels across the country, is long past. Now, a shelter like Longmont finds itself stretched beyond its capacity of 360 animals — a few more if you count the ones bunking in staff offices until a kennel opens up.

Melissa Grosjean, the marketing coordinator for Longmont Humane Society, points out that Steckling’s photos (mostly dogs but occasionaly cats) impact the facility not only by spurring inquiries from people who find their interest captured by the images, but also by generating even more social media chatter.

“Everyone loves her images so much, they’re more likely to either comment or interact with them or share them,” Grosjean says. “It’s just been invaluable to keeping our adoptable pets in front of the community at large. We can tell by the amount of inquiries and even just comments about how fabulous the photography is.”

But in an uncertain economy, adoption rates are down, and the Longmont shelter has taken on more surrendered pets, Grosjean notes. Cost of pet ownership — one study puts it between $1,200 and $2,800 a year — has gone up, and so have the shelter’s costs for line items like workers’ wages and veterinary care. Meanwhile, donations are down.

“So Marsha’s work is just critical for us right now,” Grosjean says. “We really need the community to stay interacting with us and thinking about us when they do have some funds to give, and all of that is dependent on Marsha’s beautiful photography — because people love looking at it.”

A trip that changed everything

In 2007, two years into ongoing relief efforts for Hurricane Katrina, Steckling and her sister, Jeanne, decided to head to New Orleans and pitch in some volunteer work. Steckling was thinking of connecting with Habitat for Humanity. But Jeanne showed her a documentary, “Dark Water Rising: Survival Stories of Hurricane Katrina Animal Rescues,” which featured Animal Rescue New Orleans, or ARNO, which started just a year after Katrina.    

“And by the end of it, we were both like, ‘Yeah, we’re going,’” Jeanne recalls. “It’s just been really important for both of us ever since.”

The new ARNO facility helped handle the overflow of existing shelters, some of which had been flooded out, and the burgeoning population of pets, mostly dogs, whose homes had disappeared with the floodwaters.

Both women took their cameras to chronicle the experience, but their mission was to provide the shelter whatever help it needed — initially chores like cleaning kennels, walking dogs and socializing cats. At the end of the day, Steckling would document the work being done, as well as shoot the occasional dog portrait.

Outside the shelter, the sisters roamed a city still reeling from Katrina. They accompanied shelter workers searching neighborhoods and nearby woodlands for strays and gathering images of the abandoned houses and, inevitably, the loose — and elusive — animals meandering among them. 

Steckling soon became acquainted with three littermates that workers referred to as “the outlaws” that lived beneath one of the vacant structures, scavenging and basically living the feral life. One they dubbed Billy the Kid, the other two Jesse and James.

One of the ARNO volunteers would venture to the house over her lunch hour and sit on the porch, speaking to the pups in the hope that eventually her voice would become familiar and build trust. She fed them scraps of food and chatted them up over a period of months before workers were able to capture the three, bring them to the shelter and begin socializing them with the help of other volunteers.

Steckling started walking Billy the Kid. Jeanne would walk Jesse at the same time, and the two dogs would enjoy each other’s company — James, unfortunately, had died during treatment for heartworm. The camaraderie of the remaining littermates marked a behavioral shift for Billy, who displayed anxiety when he was on his own. 

“I didn’t really bond with him at the shelter or really connect,” Steckling says. “I liked a lot of the dogs and I hadn’t had a dog since I was a kid, so (adoption) wasn’t really even on my mind. But after I got home — and I know this sounds Boulder-ish or cliché — but I started having dreams about him. And I was like, ‘Oh, maybe I need to adopt this dog.’”

Steckling gave ARNO a call to see if Billy was still available. He was, and the shelter put him on a plane to Denver, where she picked him up and began a long bonding process with the 2-year-old dog. 

First, she changed his name to Jackie, in honor of one of her favorite volunteers at the New Orleans shelter who always seemed to have a calming effect on the dog. Later, a DNA test narrowed the pup’s origins to a combination of border collie, boxer and Staffordshire terrier.

A year into Jackie’s adjustment, when Steckling sensed that he seemed lonely, she dialed New Orleans again to see if Jesse was available for adoption. Soon, the two dogs were reunited.

“It was the best decision ever,” Steckling says. “They remembered each other and were just the best duo for their many years together.”

Jesse died at 9, but Jackie lived five more years. It’s been two years since Steckling lost him, and she hasn’t yet felt the time was right to reinvest her love in a new companion.

Steckling, 57, had developed a career in family portraiture before she and Jeanne embarked on their volunteer mission. But the experience — not so much the artistic element as the animal rescue vibe even in what she recalls as a rundown, bare-bones New Orleans facility — began to change her professional focus.

“This was not a pretty shelter,” she says of the ARNO facility. “But I really was attracted to the way that people care about the animals and the animals’ resiliency and just the whole process. And then the photographing of the animals just really kind of spoke to me, so I wanted to come home and do that at my local shelter.”

Among those in the area, she picked the Longmont facility, where she began to volunteer for all the usual tasks like dog walking and a practice of affectionate interaction simply called “dog TLC.” Eventually, she began helping on some photography projects, including some aimed at capturing the personality of dogs that had been there for a particularly long time, in the hope a compelling portrait might lead to adoption.

A dog named Yogi brought Steckling’s experience full circle. Trapped in the floodwaters of Katrina, his coat burned from waterborne chemicals, he was rescued in New Orleans but somehow ended up at the Longmont Humane Society. Perhaps because of his fur loss, Yogi attracted little interest —  until new photos helped him find a loving home. 

Eventually, Steckling built a program that, aside from her two days a week volunteering, includes another dog photographer and three cat photographers. When there’s a need for a new volunteer to fill any of the roles from handler to photographer, applicants get funneled to Steckling, who determines their skill level, trains and mentors them.

To Jeanne Steckling, the impact of the New Orleans experience “just felt like a thunderbolt,” and her sister’s continued devotion to volunteer photography seems just a natural consequence of the experience.

“I really think this is her life’s work,” Jeanne says.

Capturing the moment

On a sunny Sunday morning, Steckling has a list of nine new arrivals to photograph while, all around her, volunteers are walking dogs or supervising them as they splash in the fenced-in wading pools. She sets up in her usual spot, on a shaded side of the Humane Society building, in front of a waist-high gray concrete wall. 

The setting isn’t what matters — in fact, there’s even been a study on that, which found that photo backgrounds have little, if any, impact on viewers’ impressions. It’s all about the dog, and today’s first arrival is a 3-year-old mutt named George, led on a thin leash (later Photoshopped out of the finished portrait) by volunteer Rob Mazzola. Coaxed by the squeaky toy and some treats, George responds with some classic poses.

“That’s what I’m looking for,” Steckling coos, “mouth open.”

Soon George is followed by 11-year-old Banana, surrendered by an owner who’d become homeless. Then comes Dave, a German shepherd, followed by Hotdog, a stray pug with an expressive mug that stares straight into Steckling’s lens. Next come Hershey, Mira, Koopa — a huge hound that seems about 90% floppy ears — and Alexandrine, a stray who’s skittish, but soon offers a fetching head tilt before sniffing out the extra treats in Steckling’s bag.

There’s also Jessie, a black female Lab mix who’s reluctant to settle down. A duck call, a squeaker — both elicit a steady bark. Nevertheless, Steckling gets her shot. Working with dogs required some trial and error, but certain skills transferred well from her work with human subjects. She absorbed a lot about dog behavior as she eased into her volunteer work in Longmont — when to approach, when to take her time.

“Dogs sometimes need a lot of space and a lot of time, so I can pick that up pretty quickly just in the first minute or two,” she says, “and I just continue to keep my eyes open on each individual dog and work with them in the way they need to be worked with.”

After a few shots, Steckling pulls out a collection of colorful bandanas from her bag — accessories provided by Indy & Olly’s, an Evergreen-based company committed to promoting dog adoptions by donating bandanas to spice up a dog’s appearance in shelter photos. When a dog seems agreeable to wearing one, Steckling slips it on and snaps a few extra shots.

“Hopefully they relax a little and just give me that nice little smile with a head tilt — that’s what I’m really going for,” she says. “I just have to work with each dog with what works for them.”

Deaf dogs can be challenging because they don’t always respond to her sounds. In those cases, she turns to visuals, like having a third volunteer stand behind the camera and jump and wave to elicit a reaction. Scared or shy dogs require patience — and sometimes recognition that they’re just not ready for their close-up. Even if the shoot fizzles, Steckling continues to interact with the dog until it appears to be relaxed in her presence. 

She never wants a dog to have a bad experience.

“They don’t know what this black thing is in my hand, my camera, so I will let them sniff it and I’ll feed them treats by my camera,” she says. “I’ll click the shutter. If they don’t acclimate to that and start to relax, then I’ll just say, ‘Let’s try again next week.’” 

At the other end of the behavior spectrum are the occasional subjects like Russell, a pup who loved the camera as much as the camera loved him. A few weeks ago, Steckling connected with him and found a dog that was confident, playful and so well trained that he would perform a whole routine of shaking with each paw and then rolling over.

“On cue,” she says, “every single time.”

So when Steckling needed to produce some stock images for the shelter’s social media accounts, she and Russell got together and had some fun.

“I started putting sunglasses on him,” she says, “and he was like, ‘Give me another pair.’ He would just do anything I wanted him to do. And he did actually get adopted.”

By the end of last year, Steckling surpassed 4,000 dogs photographed at the Longmont facility. Overall, the shelter has adopted out about 37,500 animals since 2010 (the earliest year in its records), Grosjean says — and either Steckling or the volunteers she trains and coordinates have produced their portraits.

“She has her hand in it all,” Grosjean says.

Occasionally, Steckling will do her shoot indoors, but mostly the photos are staged in front of the same gray wall. Props are minimal.

“This isn’t about trying to dress them up,” she says. “It’s just trying to bring out their personality. It’s all about the dog itself, not the setting. I try to keep it simple.”

From time to time, she’ll do specialty shoots for social media campaigns or to highlight some of the “longtimer” dogs who haven’t drawn much adoption interest. On these, she might introduce ice cream cones — that’s an upcoming project — or let them catch gently tossed treats, an exercise that can result in some eye-catching facial contortions. 

But it’s always about freezing the telling moment, the priceless expression, that can connect an animal with a forever home.

“We really want their personality to shine,” Steckling says. “We want that to be the point of the photo.”

If you attend the Greater Hartford Shakespeare Festival at the University of Saint Joseph this month, step deep into the small art museum inside the school’s Autorino Center for the Arts and Humanities, past the quaint 20th-century paintings and drawings from the permanent collection, and bask in the glow of Butch Wandy’s “micro-prismatic” photography.

The twisting, oddly shaped and vibrant patterns and textures seem like they could have been digitally generated but turn out to be Ilfochrome prints created through careful lighting, reflections and synthetic materials.

Wandy is in a line of visual artists going back to Man Ray, who are able to use the photographic process to unleash new dimensions in color and light.

Wandy, who was born in Hartford in 1941 and graduated from UConn in 1963, developed his technique over 40 years ago before the digital revolution. He has worked in other media, but his micro-prismatic images are what has gotten him a lot of attention. He developed the style over 40 years ago when he was sales manager for a firm that specialized in decorative plastic sheets. He dealt with other artists who were inspired by the material, including Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

There are dozens of Wandy’s delightful micro-prismatic visions on view, some of which were recently gifted to the museum by Henry Link. Others were lent by the artists. All were recently created. The works are creatively hung so that their shapes and patterns complement each other. Many are untitled, but some have evocative titles like “Kenya is Bleeding,” “Ancient Echoes” and “All That Glitters.” One dark swirling image is labeled “Atlantic Tempest: A tribute to Joseph Turner,” the early 20th-century British artist known for his intense stormy seascapes.

The Butch Wandy exhibit is up through Aug. 26 and is ideal for summertime gallery viewing.  The Art Museum at University of Saint Joseph is at 1678 Asylum Ave., West Hartford. usj.edu/arts/art-museum/.

The American murder ballad belongs to a tradition of austere folk songs that migrated from Britain and Ireland to America along with several waves of 19th-century emigrants. Knoxville Girl, for instance, which was first recorded in 1924, and later covered by the Louvin Brothers, Nick Cave and the Handsome Family among others, is an adaptation of an Irish song, The Wexford Girl, which itself was based on and older English ballad The Oxford Girl. The location may have changed, but the song’s grisly narrative remained constant:

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!”

Knoxville Girl is one of several murder ballads that punctuate Kristine Potter’s photobook, Dark Waters. Her fascination is with the songs in which women are the victims of jealous, vindictive or easily slighted male partners. “A large portion of these ballads detail the murder of a woman at the hands of a man, for whatever inconvenience she represented,” she writes in the book’s short afterword. “They are part of a larger tradition of celebrating and commodifying violence against women.”

Potter, who grew up in Georgia and now lives in Nashville, made the work on various extended road trips around the American south. Comprising deserted rural landscapes – creeks; backroads; dark, dense woodlands – and mysterious, semi-staged portraits, the book maps out a kind of southern gothic psychogeography that is both imaginative and real, familiar and strange.

Some of the images have intriguing titles – The Haunting, Spirit Lifting from Lynch River – while others are actual, and no less evocative, place names – Bloody Fork, Blackwater Swamp.

“I grew up in Georgia near a place called Murder Creek,” says Potter, “and when I visited it, my imagination would take over. When I went back there to photograph, I was thinking not just about the real violence that had occurred there, but the traditions of southern gothic literature, which is an imaginative landscape where violent things can and often do happen.”

Only a few landscapes in the book, though, are directly linked to historical incidents that are memorialised in murder ballads. “I didn’t want to rely on that idea as it just seemed too gimmicky. Instead, I wanted to create images that somehow related to the way that fiction and reality mix in your mind to make you interpret, or react to, certain spaces like woodland canopies or a deserted creek. There are many landscapes in the south that are dark and unknowable, but when you come across them, it’s as if they already live inside your head from books or films.”

Potter is also keen to point out that the songs are simply a starting point for a project that carries a deeper and more contemporary resonance. “The archetypal story that is told in many old murder ballads is one we continue to tell over and over in contemporary culture: in films and crime fiction, on streaming platforms and true crime podcasts. And these stories, often involving women being killed, remain incredibly popular – the entertainment industry does not produce material we do not want.”

The first image in the book immediately sets the almost otherworldly tone: a portrait of a young woman in woodland, her eyes closed, her long hair cascading around her shoulders, her expression rapt. “I call her the medium,” says Potter. “You enter the narrative of the book through her.”

Threaded through the landscapes are several even more disconcerting studio portraits, in which young women dressed in old-fashioned looking clothes strike awkward and unsettling poses, their expressions alert or suspicious, sometimes defiant. How much instruction does she give her subjects? “Not a lot, really. In the studio, it was about how they dressed, or if I wanted them to have wet hair; whatever added to the idea of the picture that I had in my head. Mostly, though, it’s a waiting game in which I’m putting people at ease and then waiting for the telling gesture.”

The studio portraits, though choreographed to a degree, exude a deep psychological presence. “I want people to know that women carry these stories in their psyche,” she says. “The potential to run into a man who might be dangerous or to enter a landscape, whether walking in a wood or across a parking lot at night, in which something could go wrong, is always there in our heads. That is the psychic terrain of the book.”

I wondered if there were times when she was on location that she felt spooked or uneasy? “Well, I think that, particularly if you are a woman on your own, there is always a persistent awareness that you are not actually alone. That is especially true if you are in a darkened or deserted place. There is always some guy down by the river.”

Once, she tells me, when she was photographing on her own by a creek, Potter heard a voice call out from the woods behind her – “You must really like rivers. I saw you here yesterday.” When she turned around, her watcher was nowhere to be seen. “He was trying to engage me, but my immediate thought was, ‘I’m not safe here’. It was one of those moments, but afterwards I was so angry; I was angry that I had to leave, that I didn’t get the picture, and that I was vulnerable.” The encounter and her reaction to it, she says, “was about everything I’m talking about through the photographs”.

Potter was raised in Georgia in a military family, but describes herself as “from the south, but not of the south”. She received an MFA in photography from Yale in 2005 and was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018. Her previous projects include The Grey Line, a series of portraits made at West Point Military Academy, which explored the “very particular kind of patriarchy and folklore associated with military heroism”. Her last book, Manifest (2018), also interrogated traditional masculinity though the myth of the American cowboy.

She began making Dark Waters in 2015, when she was living in New York, initially using film and shooting on a large format camera. After moving to Nashville in 2017, she switched to a medium format digital. “The sensors are extraordinary,” she enthuses. “You can make photographs in almost complete darkness. Part of my mission was to try to describe the particular darkness of certain landscapes in the rural American south – when night falls, say, or when I was shooting in dense woodland – with absolute precision.”

Dark Waters is a darkly beautiful book, the deep, rich monochrome tones in perfect sync with the subject matter. A haunting short story, Blood Harmony, by the American writer Rebecca Bengal, complements the deep sense of place and heightened atmosphere of the photographs. The lyrics to murder ballads like Delia’s Gone, The Jealous Lover and Down in the Willow Garden are printed on dark green paper, relics of another time that echoes into the present. “The songs still resonate,” she says. “I see them as cautionary tales about women’s behaviour.”

Potter describes her approach to image-making as that of “a very responsive observer”. Her patient attentiveness is evident throughout Dark Waters, a book as complex, atmospheric and disquieting as its title suggests.

• Dark Waters is published by Aperture