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.
