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

Michael Joseph: Lost & Found

By Michael Joseph

Publisher : Kehrer Verlag

2024 | 144 pages

Lost & Found documents a contemporary American subculture of young Travelers through raw, striking portraiture and intimate storytelling. These Travelers abandon home to move around the country by hitchhiking and freight train hopping in a nomadic, transient existence outside of mainstream society. Along their personal journey driven by wanderlust, escapism, or a search for transient jobs, they find a new family in their traveling friends.

The high of freedom, however, does not come without consequence. The black and white portraits are made in public, on the street, using natural light. Individual stories, as a collection, form a greater narrative. Over ten years in the making, Joseph’s portraits reveal the human condition. They capture courage, tenderness, and determination in his subjects that have been largely ignored and unseen.

An incredible book that we highly recommend! All About Photo

All About Michael Joseph

I’m So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now

By Pauline Vermare

Publisher : Aperture

2024 | 440 pages

I’m So Happy You Are Here presents a much-needed counterpoint, complement, and challenge to historical precedents and the established canon of Japanese photography. This restorative history presents a wide range of photographic approaches brought to bear on the lived experiences and perspectives of women in Japanese society. Editors Pauline Vermare and Lesley A. Martin, curator and writer Takeuchi Mariko, and photo-historians Carrie Cushman and Kelly Midori McCormick provide a critical historical and contemporary framework for understanding the work in three richly illustrated essays. Additional context is provided by an in-depth illustrated bibliography by Marc Feustel and Russet Lederman, and a selection of key critical writings from leading Japanese curators, critics, and historians such as Kasahara Michiko, Fuku Noriko, and others, many of which will be published in translation for the first time. While this book does not claim to be fully comprehensive or encyclopedic, its goal is to provide a solid foundation for a more thorough conversation about the contributions of Japanese women to photography—and an indispensable resource for anyone interested in a more robust history of Japanese photography.

Lisa McCord: Rotan Switch

By Lisa McCord

Publisher : Kehrer Verlag

2024 | 204 pages

Rotan Switch is the first monograph by Lisa McCord, documenting life on her grandparents’ cotton farm in the Arkansas Delta community of Rotan. It takes its name from the community’s central landmark—the railroad switch where farmers loaded their cotton bales onto trains headed out of the Delta. Although it hasn’t been used in years, it remains a potent symbol of the complex intersections of industry and agriculture, of race and injustice. Collected over the last forty-four years, these images and stories are a reflection on the people and places that have taught McCord the meaning of the word home. It is also a self-exploration into her inherently complicated role in this community as both the photographer and the granddaughter of the farm owner.
This publication is a long-term project, constructed from McCord's analog photographs, family snapshots and ephemera. Including, monochrome photographs, color polaroids, and recipes.

All About Lisa McCord

João Pina: Tarrafal

By João Pina

Publisher : GOST Books

2024 | 284 pages

João Pina draws upon his family history to tell the story of the Portuguese concentration camp at Tarrafal, Cape Verde which operated between 1936 and 1974. The visual history of the camp is told through the only known photographs taken inside the Tarrafal camp, combined with correspondence, archives, objects and Pina’s own contemporary photographs. Collectively these materials create a new dialogue about the Portuguese fascist regime of the past—and the resistance to it—on the 50th anniversary of its demise. In 1949, Pina’s grandfather Guilherme da Costa Carvalho—a young communist militant— was sent to the camp. Later that year Guilherme’s parents were granted unprecedented permission to visit their son and using a Rolleiflex camera they photographed all the living prisoners and the graves of the ones who had died in the camp. This extensive visual record—the only one ever made inside the concentration camp—was created with the intent of reporting back to the families of the other prisoners held in the camp or had died there. Seventy years later, in 2019, Pina began investigating a box in his family archive containing the negatives, contact sheets, vintage prints of these pictures made inside the camp, along with related letters and telegrams sent from his grandfather.

A Poor Sort of Memory by Tracy L Chandler

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