A Poor Sort of Memory by Tracy L Chandler

A new book, by photographer Tracy L Chandler, explores the memory she has of, and trauma she associates with, growing up.

A Poor Sort of Memory, published by Deadbeat Club, is Chandler’s debut monograph, and is a collection of serene, eerie, and minimalist landscapes.

Chandler decided to revisit and photograph her Californian desert hometown, particularly locations she remembers escaping to as a youth - places she found solace in from the morbid chaos of her family home. As a result, her images emanate unshakeable feelings of claustrophobia and alienation, and are haunted by ghosts, memories, and emotions of yesteryear.

Tracy L Chandler said: “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.”

As she re-navigated her hometown, Chandler reconciled the objective reality before her with the subjective truths of her own memories. But rather than shy away from this ambiguity, Chandler embraced her role of unreliable narrator, and used the remnants of her history to craft a new photographic fiction.

Tracy L Chandler added: “I found myself chasing ghosts and evading monsters, and I struggled to parse memory from fantasy and reflection from projection. “Do I believe that making photographs will bring back some sort of truth? My experience is the opposite.”

Chandler’s work dives further down the rabbit hole of memory, and evokes the White Queen’s words in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland … ‘ It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.’

A Poor Sort of Memory © Tracy L Chandler

Tracy L Chandler
Tracy L Chandler is a photographic artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Her work explores humanity and her own personal story reflected through portraiture, landscape, and narrative. Her photographs address themes of time, place, memory, seeing, and being seen.

In 2023, she had a solo exhibition at Gallery 169 in Santa Monica as well as screened a short film of her project A Poor Sort of Memory at the Arles Rencontres photography festival in France. Tracy has participated in multiple group exhibitions including The Oregon Contemporary, The Museum of Warsaw, Baxter St Gallery, These Days Gallery, Candela Gallery, and The Humid. Her work has garnered many recognitions including scholarships and awards from the Hopper Prize Foundation, Lucie Foundation, Critical Mass, PH Museum, Arles Book Awards, Charcoal Book Club, Urbanautica Institute, and Los Angeles Center of Photography. Her work have been featured in publications including Fotofilmic, California Sun, and the Humble Arts Foundation.
www.tracylchandler.com
@tracylchandler

A Poor Sort of Memory © Tracy L Chandler

Virginia Hanusik: Into the Quiet and the Light

By Virginia Hanusik

Publisher : Columbia Books on Architecture and the City

2024 | 184 pages

In South Louisiana, where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico, water―and the history of controlling it―is omnipresent. Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana glimpses the vulnerabilities and possibilities of living on the water during an ongoing climate catastrophe and the fallout of the fossil fuel industry―past, present, and future. The book sustains our physical, mental, and emotional connections to these landscapes through a collection of photographs by Virginia Hanusik. Framing the architecture and infrastructure of South Louisiana with both distance and intimacy, introspection and expansiveness, this work engages new memories, microhistories, anecdotes, and insights from scholars, artists, activists, and practitioners working in the region. Unfolding alongside and in dialogue with Hanusik’s photographs, these reflections soberly and hopefully populate images of South Louisiana’s built and natural environments, opening up multiple pathways that defy singularity and complicate the disaster-oriented imagery often associated with the region and its people. In staging these meditations on water, life, and land loss, this book invites readers to join both Hanusik and the contributors in reading multiplicity into South Louisiana’s water-ruled landscapes.

With texts from Richie Blink, Imani Jacqueline Brown, Jessica Dandridge, Rebecca Elliott, Michael Esealuka, T. Mayheart Dardar, Billy Fleming, Andy Horowitz, Arthur Johnson, Louis Michot, Nini Nguyen, Kate Orff, Jessi Parfait, Amy Stelly, Jonathan Tate, Aaron Turner, and John Verdin.

Rawsht Twana: Twana’s Box

By Rawsht Twana

Publisher : Fraglich Publishing

2024 | 252 pages

Twana’s Box' can be described in many ways: a journey through a photographer’s rare archive, documenting the Kurdistan region of Iraq from 1974–1992; a son’s quest to find his lost father, who was murdered by a military regime; a young man’s way to piece together the fragments of a scattered family in a scattered culture; the becoming of a photographer who, through the stories of others, starts to understand his own identity in times of war. 'Twana’s Box' is not only the photo book that holds a selection of Twana Abdullah’s archive; it is a unique insight into a time and place in a region that has since completely transformed. Rawsht has spent years piecing together his father’s negatives and stories. His archival work inspired him to become a photographer himself, working for Metrography – the first independent Iraqi photo agency – before immigrating to Europe. ills colour & bw, 21 x 27 cm, hb, Kurdish/Arabic/English

Akinbode Akinbiyi: Being, Seeing, Wandering

By Akinbode Akinbiyi

Publisher : Spector Books

2024 | 252 pages

Taken across Europe and Africa, Akinbiyi’s images of everyday city life muse on the sociopolitical labyrinths of urban society

Whether in Bamako, Berlin, London, Lagos or Durban, British photographer Akinbode Akinbiyi (born 1946) creates black-and-white street scenes that function as visual metaphors, ruminating on cultural change, social exclusion and colonialism’s effect on urban planning.

Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm

By Grace Wales Bonner

Publisher : The Museum of Modern Art, New York

2024 | 184 pages

A deeply personal meditation on and around modern Black expression, curated by the acclaimed London-based designer
This volume, Grace Wales Bonner: Dream in the Rhythm―Visions of Sound and Spirit in the MoMA Collection, is an artist’s book created by the acclaimed London-based designer Grace Wales Bonner as “an archive of soulful expression.” Through an extraordinary selection of nearly 80 works from The Museum of Modern Art’s collection and archives, this unique volume draws multisensory connections between pictures and poems, music and performance, hearing and touch, gestures and vibrations, and bodies in motion. Photographs, scores and films by artists such as Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Roy DeCarava, Lee Friedlander, David Hammons, Glenn Ligon, Steve McQueen, Lorna Simpson and Ming Smith, among others, are juxtaposed with signal texts by Black authors spanning the past century, including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, Robin Coste Lewis, Ishmael Reed, Greg Tate, Jean Toomer, Quincy Troupe and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Artist’s Choice: Grace Wales Bonner―Spirit Movers, this resplendent publication is a deeply personal meditation on and around modern Black expression that echoes Wales Bonner’s own vibrant, virtuosic designs.

A Poor Sort of Memory by Tracy L Chandler

More information

Selected Books