Tracy L. Chandler
A Poor Sort of Memory
Fábrica Cal Garbat
In her childhood, the Californian desert (with its concrete canals and rocks) served as a refuge from family turmoil and her father’s death: a physical place of escape which, over the years, became a mental space.
Decades later, the author returns to those same places as a mother: she is no longer fleeing the present, but heading towards a past that continues to shift and never ceases to be rewritten. Straddling memory and fantasy, she declares herself an unreliable narrator and transforms the remnants of her story into a new photographic fiction, an escape from the facts towards her own version of them.
The title recalls the White Queen’s warning to Alice: a memory that only works backwards is a poor sort of memory.
Tracy L. Chandler (Los Angeles) is a photographer whose work explores memory, perception and the California desert as both a physical and psychological landscape.
Her work, which spans photography, installations, sculpture, film and photobooks, has received numerous accolades and is held in the collections of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Getty Research Institute.
In 2024, she published her first monograph, A Poor Sort of Memory.
