In A Poor Sort of Memory, Tracy L Chandler’s debut monograph, the California desert becomes both a site of visual introspection and a fractured mirror of memory.
With a lens attuned to both the intimate and the uncanny, Chandler revisits her adolescent refuges—concrete washes, sun-bleached rock formations, and other peripheries of her desert hometown. Once sanctuaries from a chaotic domestic sphere, these terrains now bear the weight of emotional sediment, refracted through the distancing gaze of the camera.
What emerges is not a nostalgic excavation, but a psychic map of a landscape at odds with itself. Chandler captures the arid quietude of the desert in a style that is nearly minimalist, yet each image pulses with unease. The starkness of the environment contrasts with the emotional density embedded in each frame, evoking a tension between the visible and the remembered. Her photographs, while ostensibly documentary, dissolve into a space where ghosts and monsters—the artifacts of memory—blur the lines between reality and recollection.
Chandler’s approach is unapologetically subjective, positioning herself as an unreliable narrator in a terrain that is already treacherously familiar. There is no resolution offered—only the embrace of ambivalence. Her images do not seek to reclaim a past or assert a truth, but rather to inhabit the slippery territory between projection and reflection. Like the White Queen’s paradoxical wisdom, the work suggests that memory is not a linear function, but a recursive, often disorienting loop.
