To produce the photographs for his first monograph, A Poor Sort of
Memory, Tracy L Chandler returned to her hometown in the desert
Californian, not without ambivalence. "By revisiting old hiding places in
concrete wells and private bunks in rock formations, I
remembered a past full of trauma and my desperation to find
both a sense of belonging and an independent self," she explains.
explorations of his youth were a means of escaping the morbid chaos of his
family home and find refuge in the outskirts. Thus, in these
images, there is a palpable contrast between the serenity of the minimalist landscape
and the artist's unshakable feelings of claustrophobia and alienation.
As she navigated this terrain again, she found herself confronted
to the dilemma of reconciling the objective reality that presented itself to her with the
subjective truths of her memories: "I found myself hunting
ghosts and escaping monsters," Chandler said, "and I struggled to
separate memory from fantasy and reflection from projection." Rather
To escape this ambiguity, Ms. Chandler accepted the role of narrator
reliable, using the remains of its history to create a new fiction
photographic. "Do I believe that taking pictures will bring back some kind of
truth? she asks. "My experience is quite the opposite. Instead,
The work seemed to push him further down the rabbit hole, evoking the
The White Queen's words to Alice: "It is a poor kind of memory that does not
works only in reverse." Tracy L Chandler is a photographer based in
Los Angeles, California. His work explores humanity and its history
personal through portraiture, landscape and narration. His photographs
address the themes of time, place, memory, seeing and being
seen. In 2023, she presented a solo exhibition at Gallery 169 in
Santa Monica and screened a short film from his project A Poor Sort of Memory
at the Rencontres d'Arles photography festival in France.
