ThoughtGallery.org > Book Signing—Kristine Potter and Rebecca Bengal

Book Signing—Kristine Potter and Rebecca Bengal

During Late Night ICP, celebrate the releases of photographer Kristine Potter’s second monograph, Dark Matters (Aperture, $65), and photography writer Rebecca Bengal’s new book, Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists (Aperture, $29.95), during a special reading from Strange Hours and signing with the authors. This event will be held in the ICP shop. Remarks begin at 7 PM.

About the Books

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.” 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.

Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists

“A photograph lives in multiple eras at once: the time of its making, the time of its unveiling, the time of its subsequent rediscovery.” —Rebecca Bengal

In Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists, Rebecca Bengal considers the photographers who have defined our relationship to the medium. Through generous essays and interviews, she contemplates photography’s narrative power, from the radical intimacy of Nan Goldin’s New York demimonde to Justine Kurland’s pictures of rebel girls on the open road. Bengal brings us closer to pioneering artists and the personal and political stories surrounding their images. She travels with Alec Soth in Minneapolis, searching for the houses where Prince once lived, and revisits Chauncey Hare’s 1979 protest against the Museum of Modern Art. She speaks with Dawoud Bey about his evocative portraits and explores Diana Markosian’s cinematic take on her family’s immigration to the US. Throughout Strange Hours, Bengal’s prose is attuned to the alchemy of experience, chance, and vision that has always pushed photography’s potential for unforgettable storytelling.

About the Authors

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.

Rebecca Bengal is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, currently based in Brooklyn. She is a MacDowell fellowship recipient, a contributing editor at Oxford American, and a past editor at DoubleTake, American Short Fiction, the Onion, and Vogue.com. Her stories, interviews, essays, reported pieces, and collaborations with artists have been published by Aperture, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review. Bengal’s first collection of essays, Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists, is forthcoming from Aperture in 2023.











When: Thu., Aug. 17, 2023 at 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Where: International Center of Photography (ICP)
79 Essex St.
212-857-0000
Price: Free
Buy tickets/get more info now
See other events in these categories:

During Late Night ICP, celebrate the releases of photographer Kristine Potter’s second monograph, Dark Matters (Aperture, $65), and photography writer Rebecca Bengal’s new book, Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists (Aperture, $29.95), during a special reading from Strange Hours and signing with the authors. This event will be held in the ICP shop. Remarks begin at 7 PM.

About the Books

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.” 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.

Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists

“A photograph lives in multiple eras at once: the time of its making, the time of its unveiling, the time of its subsequent rediscovery.” —Rebecca Bengal

In Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists, Rebecca Bengal considers the photographers who have defined our relationship to the medium. Through generous essays and interviews, she contemplates photography’s narrative power, from the radical intimacy of Nan Goldin’s New York demimonde to Justine Kurland’s pictures of rebel girls on the open road. Bengal brings us closer to pioneering artists and the personal and political stories surrounding their images. She travels with Alec Soth in Minneapolis, searching for the houses where Prince once lived, and revisits Chauncey Hare’s 1979 protest against the Museum of Modern Art. She speaks with Dawoud Bey about his evocative portraits and explores Diana Markosian’s cinematic take on her family’s immigration to the US. Throughout Strange Hours, Bengal’s prose is attuned to the alchemy of experience, chance, and vision that has always pushed photography’s potential for unforgettable storytelling.

About the Authors

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.

Rebecca Bengal is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, currently based in Brooklyn. She is a MacDowell fellowship recipient, a contributing editor at Oxford American, and a past editor at DoubleTake, American Short Fiction, the Onion, and Vogue.com. Her stories, interviews, essays, reported pieces, and collaborations with artists have been published by Aperture, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review. Bengal’s first collection of essays, Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists, is forthcoming from Aperture in 2023.

Buy tickets/get more info now