A Poor Sort of Memory
Tracy L Chandler returned to her hometown in the Californian Mojave desert area to confront her childhood memories and reevaluate the traumatic experiences associated with the place by means of making images and revisiting the past. Her first monograph, A Poor Sort of Memory, published by Deadbeat Club, encompasses four years of work, shot between 2019 and 2023. The idea of going back down the memory lane is tightly connected to becoming a mother and realizing that closure with her past is required to be able to move forward.
The narrative revolves around the concept of memory and the reliability of childhood memories, their interpretation, and the consequences of the meaning of these memories taken into adulthood. Tracy explains, “As I photographed places and people from my past, I noticed things were often not quite as I remembered. New details of the memory would come to light, fleshing it out into a more complex story, not as simple and one-sided as it had seemed.”
To create a narrative, Tracy involves a silent character, the landscape of the desert, which plays a significant role in creating an atmosphere of isolation, acceptance, and peacefulness. The landscape also serves as a canvas, allowing other characters, such as a child and a male figure, who appears in one of the images as a hovering shadow on a house, to gain a more powerful presence and draw attention to the attempt of the photographer to bring back the experiences of the past and create a new story that will enable to step into the future.
In this conversation, Tracy speaks about her practice and approach to working on a project, from its conception to the design of the book. We discuss the role that photography can take when working with memory, and its potential to lead to a rabbit hole or become a revealing process that enables new discoveries about oneself.
Photography by Tracy L Chandler Published by Deadbeat Club Design by Clint Woodside Edit by Clint Woodside & Tracy L Chandler Production Consultation by Ward Long Special thanks to New Dimension
108 Pages
Debossed Hardcover
Full Colour Offset
9.5” x 11.5”
Get your copy at Deadbeat Club
‘As I photographed places and people from my past, I noticed things were often not quite as I remembered. New details of the memory would come to light.’
A Poor Sort of Memory
Hi Tracy, it’s very nice to meet and congratulations on your first monograph, A Poor Sort of Memory, published by Deadbeat Club. You worked on the photo book between 2019 and 2023, going back to your hometown in the Californian desert area. What was your experience like revisiting the places familiar to you as a child while rethinking the childhood memories and trauma associated with the space and your past through the prism of a grown-up person?
Thank you! And so happy to share this work with you. Great question!
After a decade in New York, I found myself back in California, not far from where I was raised in the Mojave desert. I was now a mom, and with this new parenting role came an ambivalent curiosity about my own childhood. There had been a series of traumas in my youth, and I had a hunch that revisiting them was necessary for closure and evolution. Was it possible to heal the past and make things better for my kid this time around? I started doing routine visits to the desert, retracing my steps. As I visited family and old haunts, oftentimes, waves of emotion would overtake me, all the grief and shame. All the magic and love, too. This place was strikingly beautiful. How had I not appreciated this before? I had a compulsion to use the camera to get closer.
Initially, the intention in making these photographs was to somehow verify my memory and document it… to say, “Yes, this is the place, just as I remember,” and to make a picture of that as a way to validate myself and preserve that memory into an object. But what I found was doing this did the opposite; it left me with more questions than answers. As I photographed places and people from my past, I noticed things were often not quite as I remembered. New details of the memory would come to light, fleshing it out into a more complex story, not as simple and one-sided as it had seemed. I felt unmoored. This whole process unraveled any objectivity and forced me to contend with the subjectivity of memory and the idea that impermanence is the only reality. So, I evolved my process. I started to use those memories as jumping off points to make new pictures, to use the emotion as a pointer, then photograph what was actually around me. What materialized was not an exact replica but a new narrative born of my past.
‘I would often retreat to the relative comfort of the desert, but even then, I could not escape my own grief and fear.’
The Characters
The photo book brings forward the tranquility and loneliness of the landscapes of your hometown and its surroundings. While the landscape serves as a silent character and a participant in your childhood memories, there are also human subjects in the story, a child and a male figure. Thinking about the space between the staged, the documentary, the real, and the imagined, in what way did you decide to structure the narrative and involve those characters in it to create the desired atmosphere?
Good observation, the landscape is very much the foundation of this work. The desert is vast, harsh, and unforgiving. An individual is so exposed and vulnerable. Even at night, when the sun is down, the edges just fall away to black, without any distant signs of civilization or refuge. I deliberately embraced this landscape, not only because it is, literally, where I grew up but also because it evokes the vulnerability and isolation that I remember.
The figures in these photographs are my family, my son and my uncle. These are pictures I made as we explored the landscape together, but they also serve as reminders of my own coming of age. As a child, I was reeling from the death of my father and facing the chaos that came after. I would often retreat to the relative comfort of the desert, but even then, I could not escape my own grief and fear. It was ongoing, I was always chasing ghosts and evading monsters, real or imagined. These pictures are rooted in that experience, and the resulting narrative is loose, more of a feeling space than a story with any distinct beginning, middle, and end. This feels more akin to my own memory, a sporadic unfolding of events that I was trying to navigate whilst building a sense of identity. As for most people, growing up is hard to do.
‘A photograph is not the whole moment, it's just a fraction of a second, it frames more out than in. And we cannot really preserve anything.’
The Memory Lane
At the end of the book, you address a quote from Lewis Carroll's Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which echoes the chosen title of the monograph. The quote is, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward," says the White Queen to Alice. What did you discover in the process of working on the book about your past self and the person you are today? What was important in this experience of going back to memory lane?
The White Queen is completely nonsensical, her words have no rational logic, but that is exactly how we get to the insight underneath. Confusion jars our ego out of having to know everything. I had to let go of seeking the past to embrace the present right in front of me. In making this work, oftentimes I would walk or drive around for hours, letting memory guide me… “Remember that road where so-and-so got the shit beat out of him? Go there,” it would say. And I would. At first, I would set up the camera, and as soon as I tried to pin down the memory into a photograph, it would all drain away. I began to realize that’s not how this works. That’s not how photography works. This was the rabbit hole I found myself in, freefalling. So I stopped trying so hard, stopped being so literal.
I decided to allow these memories to be notions, to be the seeds for making something new. I would let myself play, build sculptures, or stack rocks. I recruited my family to help personify these notions and play out old narratives, almost like a kid plays make-believe. The contributions of my son and uncle allowed for a whole new level of complexity and understanding. I was seeing these figures from a distance. Was my son just a proxy for me, a stand-in? How were my past and psychological projections limiting his self-image? I began to direct him less, to let him do his thing and find the photograph he presented me.
Ultimately, making this work fully shifted my understanding of the functions of photography. Yes, we can use the camera to look, connect, contend with others and our past; but we cannot find any objective truth. A photograph is not the whole moment, it's just a fraction of a second, it frames more out than in. And we cannot really preserve anything. Every time we bring up that memory, we supplant it with a new one, tinged with our present experience and perspective, hence the wisdom of the White Queen, “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
‘ For me, so many of these pictures evoke wasted innocence and tantalizing danger. The windows and doors serve as invitations, portals to escape to another realm.’
The Narrative
Some of the images seem to be key to the story unfolding. For me, those are of a lonely kid sitting on a ramp in the desert, a hand holding a door, a distorted shadow of a man, and the toys lying on the ground. It's also worthwhile mentioning the recurring elements of toys, car racing attributes, and doors and windows. What was the process of deciding on the layout, the arrangement of images to create the story, and the emotion of loneliness and almost despair like when working on the printed edition?
Yes, you are picking up on many of the themes. There are many literal references to my personal history, for example, my father’s death from a motorcycle accident, but I feel these specificities can be pointers to a more universal experience. For me, so many of these pictures evoke wasted innocence and tantalizing danger. The windows and doors serve as invitations, portals to escape to another realm.
As for the edit, this was a long process of elimination. I typically work on projects for years at a time, and that allows me to see which images have staying power. Some pictures that I love right away lose their luster and relevance after a while. They may seem too obvious or too salient. For me, it's the quiet ones that sneak in and stay.
Clint and Alex Woodside at Deadbeat Club were integral in the book edit. I originally had many more portraits, and they helped me weed them out. I was too close. I was the mother of the son, not the photographer of the portrait. They helped me gain some distance to see that less can be more. I am grateful for that contribution. And I still keep those portraits for me.
