Murder ballads made their way to the United States as emigrants came from Scotland, Ireland and Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many settled in the southeastern part of this country.
The songs were shared over the years, and the lyrics changed and evolved to fit the southern environment. Many of those songs were first recorded in the early 1920s and still get new treatments to this day.
Even though the lyrics have been changed, the theme remains intact: A woman was murdered by her lover for some slight that he found inconvenient. Her body was later found floating in the river.
Songs like "Pearl Bryan," "Omie Wise," "Banks of the Ohio" and others are featured in the monograph "Dark Waters," created by photographer Kristine Potter. An award-winning photographer, Potter talked with Wisconsin Public Radio's "BETA" about her current book of mostly black-and-white landscape photos of southern United States rivers and forests and printed excerpts of song lyrics from these famous ballads.
She used the images and the songs to make a point about violence against women by men throughout history.
"I was thinking about the history of violence in the southern landscape and the cultural tendencies here — the Southern Gothic tendencies in literature and cinema, which often portray these dark, macabre sorts of things happening in the South," she said.
"I started by moving through the landscape, asking myself whether an echo of the violence that was perpetrated here, whether that still lives in the landscape today, whether we're affected by it," she continued.
The result is a book featuring stark photos of landscapes, some with people, some without, that begin to tell a story of violence and places where it might happen, often near water.
"I thought, I'm going to follow bodies of water with violent names. The provenance of those names is often not known, but things like Murder River or Bloody Creek were an architecture to put me in a place and to begin making pictures," Potter said. "The murder ballad thread came in about a year later and felt wholly related to this question."
The photos only loosely connect to the songs featured in the book. Potter was more interested in creating an unsettling feeling of fear and anxiety.
"I chose ballads where this gendered violence occurred," said Potter, "where a man has killed a woman for whatever inconvenience she's representing to him in his life. I just took excerpts from those ballads and tucked them into the sequence of the images, reminding you of the potential in the landscape, reminding you of what we carry psychically in our minds (as) women — the potential for violence — and hopefully not drawing too direct a relationship between any one photo and the lyrics."
"Part of what I hope people realize, even though these ballads feel of another era, is that these stories are still incredibly contemporary."
The song excerpts are printed on a single page with no photos. Specific phrases are lined out but still readable. Potter explains why she did it that way.
"I thought, am I just perpetuating this violence by writing these lyrics? What is my role here? And working with my editor, Leslie Martin at Aperture, and our designer, Julia Shafer, we went through dozens of ideas of how to respond to that violence in a sophisticated way, in a knowing way, and with purpose," she said. "So, the phrases that are crossed out are overt acts of violence. There's a strike through in them, and that's me disempowering those words, acknowledging them, but disempowering them simultaneously."
In addition to the landscape photos are studio images of women looking defiant and possibly frightened, but also like they will not submit to their fate.
"They're made in a studio, and the women are wet, and we had to use strobe lights. It's all very orchestrated," Potter said. "But inside of that orchestration, there are things I couldn't predict, gestures or expressions that I can't tell them to do."
"So, there's still much exploration for me there photographically. We spoke a little bit about defiance but also fear and power," she continued.
The design and layout of this book is a tour de force. It conveys a more profound meaning with each look. The images and song lyrics plunge the reader into another world, and each viewing reveals new secrets about the history of violence against people who may find themselves in one of Potter's landscapes.
"I wanted to offer an experience. I want people to reflect on the beauty and the possible fear that can exist simultaneously. I want people to consider the commodification and celebration of violence against women," Potter said. "I want them to consider the contemporary circumstance and how we participate in it. And, to consider there could be different outcomes to those stories."