Kristine Potter & Rebecca Bengal

About Episode 62

For part 1 of this episode, returning guest, photographer Kristine Potter, and first time guest, writer Rebecca Bengal, talk to Sasha about how they each started down their career paths, the similarities in their upbringings and how their early interest in music influenced the way they think about visual art. Sasha and Kristine discuss the history of “murder ballads” used to reference the casual violence against women in Kristine’s new book, Dark Waters, published by Aperture which includes a short story by Rebecca. In part 2 of this episode, Sasha and Rebecca will talk about her short story and her new book, Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists, also published by Aperture.

For part 2 of Sasha’s conversation with writer Rebecca Bengal and photographer Kristine Potter, Rebecca talks about her short story, Blood Harmony which is part of Kristine’s book, Dark Waters co-published by Aperture with Images Vevey and The Momentary. Kristine and Rebecca discuss how a piece of fiction, in this case, a short story, can function within a photobook. Sasha and Rebecca also talk about Rebecca’s new book, Strange Hours, published by Aperture, a collection of her essays on photography, and how you assemble essays written independently of one another into one book.

Kristine Potter is an artist based in Nashville, Tennessee, whose work explores masculine archetypes, the American landscape, and cultural tendencies toward mythologizing the past. Her first monograph Manifest was published by TBW Books in 2018. Her second monograph Dark Waters is being published by Aperture in the summer of 2023. Potter was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 and was awarded the Grand Prix Image Vevey for 2019-2020. Potter’s work is in numerous public and private collections including that of The High Museum of Art, The Georgia Museum of Art, the Swiss Camera Museum, and Foundation Vevey. Potter is currently an Assistant Professor of Photography at Middle Tennessee State University.

About Rebecca Bengal

Rebecca Bengal is a writer of fiction, essays, and documentary journalism about art, literature, film, music, and the environment. A regular contributor to Aperture, her writing has been published by the Paris Review, Vogue, Vanity Fair, the New York Times, Oxford American, Southwest Review, the Believer, the Guardian, and the Criterion Collection, among many others. She has contributed stories and essays to books by Carolyn Drake, Justine Kurland, Kristine Potter, Paul Graham, Danny Lyon, and Charles Portis. A MacDowell fellow in fiction and a former editor at American Short Fiction, DoubleTake, and Vogue, she holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers in Austin. Originally from western North Carolina, Bengal lives in Brooklyn.