A Poor Sort of Memory

A Poor Sort of Memory – To make the photographs in her debut monograph, A Poor Sort of Memory, Tracy L Chandler went back to her hometown in the California desert – and not without ambivalence. “As I revisited old hideouts in concrete washes and private bunks in rock formations, I was reminded of a past laden with trauma and my desperation to find both a sense of belonging and an independent self,” she says. The explorations of her youth had been a means to escape the morbid chaos of her family home and find refuge in the peripheries.
And so, in these pictures there is a palpable contrast between the serenity of the minimalist landscape and the artist’s unshakeable feelings of claustrophobia and alienation. As she re-navigated this terrain, she faced the dilemma of reconciling the objective reality before her with the subjective truths of her memories: “I found myself chasing ghosts and evading monsters,” Chandler says, “and I struggled to parse memory from fantasy and reflection from projection.”
Rather than shy away from this ambiguity, Chandler embraced the role of unreliable narrator, using the remnants of her history to craft a new photographic fiction. “Do I believe that making photographs will bring back some sort of truth?” she asks. “My experience is the opposite.” Instead, the work seemed to drive her further down the rabbit hole, evoking the White Queen’s words to Alice: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”