The first time I heard this quote years ago, it stopped me cold: Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them. Sometimes things feel too close to the bone. All those times you’ve had to take the long route home, spend extra for a taxi, laugh at someone’s bad jokes to avoid anger, retaliation. Done something you didn’t want to do just to get out of the fight over doing it. And worse.
Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.
Not surprisingly, it’s a paraphrasing of something Margaret Atwood once said. Of course she did.
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Dark Waters, a new monograph from photographer Kristine Potter, embodies and investigates exactly this in a series of black-and-white images set in the Gothic South and juxtaposed with the lyrics of 19th- and 20th-century “murder ballads,” wherein girls and women meet their ends over and over again, most often by a river or a roadside. That Atwood quote came to mind as I turned each page of the exquisitely constructed book, copublished by Aperture with Images Vevey and The Momentary.
From the moment crime scene photography infiltrated our daily intake of news, what was once an image of the bucolic side of a country stream could also, now, represent violence in the popular imagination. Something too empty, lonely, not populated with witnesses, could easily be the place women have long known to fear. Context is everything, we have learned. And the great gift of good art is that it can shift lenses and generate cognitive dissonance to push us into recognizing how wrong (or violent) the status quo can be. In Potter’s richly layered and noirish photographs, we are confronted with those haunted sites with titles like Troublesome Creek, Hangman’s Curve, Bloody Fork, and Murder Creek 1. The unsettling landscapes are interspersed with portraits of reimagined victims like Knoxville Girl, dressed in antique clothes and wringing out her hair, and others of possible perpetrators, like a man walking shirtless down a road. Our bone-deep knowledge makes us fear the worst.
Facing some of the plates on opposite, deep green pages are the lyrics to songs like “Delia’s Gone” and “Down in the Willow Garden,” only two among the murder ballads that have entered our mainstream via stars like Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, and Art Garfunkel. The genre traveled from Scotland and England and became part of the American folk firmament, especially in Appalachia. They are songs of murder and hauntings and retaliation and very often, as Potter writes, “the murder of a woman at the hands of a man, for whatever inconvenience she represented.”
Potter does something small but significant on those pages. You’d miss it if you were just leafing through. She has crossed out the words and lines that describe the moment of the act of murder. In “The Jealous Lover,” the last four lines read:
Down on her knees before him,
She pleaded for her life,
But deep into her bosom,
He plunged the fatal knife.
Across from the lyrics is a photograph titled After the Struggle, the empty bamboo-lined shore of a stream. Our experience of violence (and crime scenes, sung or pictured) imbues the piece with our dark, accrued knowledge. A knowledge we wish we didn’t have to have. And yet, there is something hopeful, unflinching, and powerful in Potter’s act of crossing out. The book closes with “Blood Harmony,” a short story by Rebecca Bengal that matches Potter’s tone with her own brilliant tale of Southern madness and pain and men and women and little girls who sing the murder ballads their father taught them. There is danger, fear, volatility and the preceding photographs hover in the mind’s eye. But as with Potter’s strike-throughs, we see a glimmer of agency in Bengal’s girl. May it be so.
Rebecca Bengal Kristine Potter: Dark Waters
