Tracy L Chandler
Tracy L Chandler
A POOR SORT OF MEMORY
108 PAGES
HARDCOVER
FULL COLOR OFFSET
9.5” X 11.5”
Deadbeat Club Books
About the Book:
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.”
Book review by Jeff Smudde |
A Poor Sort of Memory is a spineless book with a strong backbone as Tracy L Chandler revisits her hometown in California. Throughout the book, a narrative is formed by moving through a harsh Southern California desert. There are portals, bones, lost items and (physically) broken homes. The photograph of a grave with a stone that appears very recently engraved (while the crucifix appears decades old) reads “Unidentified Male” brings about brightly-lit dreadful feeling, while the following photograph of white flowers grounds the pairing into a more inviting space. This push-pull of the old and the living is felt throughout the sequence of the book.
Chandler quotes one of my favorite story books at the end of the book –
“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,’ says the White Queen to Alice.”
- Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
Down the rabbit hole we go, and into the photos of cave openings, overpasses, and dark desert night with only a camera’s flash (or perhaps car headlights) to guide us. In the quote, the White Queen mentions that this memory “only works backwards.” Something that I’ve often done with photo books is to view them in reverse sequence – now this is a very literal application of the quote to Chandler’s book, alas it does create another variation of the narrative she poses through the work.
Something strange happens when you view a book backward to its intention – however, the book’s design lends itself to be viewed in both ways, with the front and back cover with the same design style such that either could be the front (aside from the publication info in the back). Suddenly, the quote from the White Queen is at the beginning of the sequence after a photo of an individual at the vanishing point of a long road. Some book makers (including myself) believe a sequence should work both ways, even if the other direction evokes a different pathological response.
Much of the scenes encountered in the book showcase human ingenuity, problem-solving after the years and desert sands have taken much of the shine off of the structures throughout the landscape. The beginning of the book sets a stage of this feeling, starting off almost welcoming with palm trees on a hill, a shack on wooden slats that looks more for show than for function, a child on a BMX ramp, a house for sale, an old house door being opened by a ring-clad hand. These scenes make for an uneasy welcome, that which Chandler likely felt when returning to her hometown to make these photos.
The motif of shadow – of darkness – allows Chandler to control the viewer’s eye more plumbly. The sequence feels to move from late afternoon to night to the next morning, moving from warm tones to a foreboding, mysterious landscape, to a discovery of the next day, and repeats itself for another day. Even if that was not Chandler’s intent, that two-day flow works for this book as the photographs presented become more abstracted from reality as time passes. Dead trees and bushes, broken machinery, a heavily damaged fence, a bird nest in a porcelain sink, a curved concrete wall that almost looks like a disguised Richard Serra sculpture.
The rough landscape and stark sunlight (or artificial light) depicted by Chandler move the viewer through an emotional investigation of place. Her bittersweet relationship with this place, a reminder of her youth, comes through with a mature perspective but a permission to explore this place from an escape-focused, punk-mindset teenager’s eye. Chandler’s work invites us to hesitantly explore the scenes in her photographs with her familiarized guidance.
Selected work from A Poor Sort of Memory will be on view from May 10 to July 4 in Los Angeles. View the work by appointment here.
