Tracy L Chandler’s new photo series A Poor Sort of Memory re-evokes the ghostly memories of her past

Initially getting into the craft through skateboarding in her teenage years, image making was, at first, a way for photographer Tracy L Chandler to “be part of a community and preserve what I loved to look at: that friend, that trick, that spot”, she says. Photography has always stuck around for the ride though and with years of commercial work under her belt, the photographer has now brought her attention to the potential of the medium for self expression and reflection. In recent years she has developed a focus on more personal projects, following her return to art school for her MFA. “It took time for me to build confidence in that, to allow myself to play without some functional output for a magazine or brand… It was a revelation that I could make work for myself,” she shares.

A very intimate and personal endeavour, her latest photo series A Poor Sort of Memory, published by Deadbeat club, documents the memories Tracy has of growing up, and the experiences of trauma she associates with her youth. The project started when Tracy found herself back home in Palm Springs California “a resort town in the Mojave Desert”, after a decade of living in New York — a place where she was once “a local, a desert rat, living on the edge of town and making my way through a series of family traumas,” she says. “As with most people, growing up is hard to do.”

Returning as a new mother, the photographer became curious about her own childhood once again, retracing her steps “to visit family and old haunts”. Taking her camera with her on the journey, she aimed to capture all the emotions her return brought up: “the grief and shame… all the magic and love too [...] Once again I had that compulsion to preserve, to use the camera to get closer, to photograph what I loved to look at,” she says.

The process of documenting this series of eerie, but strangely peaceful desert landscapes was not straightforward though. “Oftentimes I would walk or drive around for hours letting memory and intuition guide me,” the photographer says. “At first, I would set up the camera and as soon as I tried to pin down the feeling into a photograph, it would all drain away. I began to realise that’s not how this works. That’s not how photography works. 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.” This approach led her to the freedom to interfere with her natural scenes and recruit family members as participants to personify former narratives and old emotional landscapes.

Looming shadows, redundant objects and old hideouts of vacant sand-filled structures populate Tracy’s series of quiet compositions. “Both barren and beautiful” the photographer’s settings can’t help but instil a looming sense of danger and claustrophobia — a hand curls around an open door: “we’re outside the house, not in. The hand is tempting us to enter without a face, there is uncertainty, maybe danger. It’s tantalising and terrifying at the same time,” explains the photographer. Key in the series for Tracy is the boy on the ramp, captured sitting on a decayed and now futile structure “that points up to the sky”, the image is a “heartbreaking” translation of the feeling of intense isolation.

Contending with the ghosts of her past, to “evoke the fraught complexities of coming of age”, the photographer tells us that this project in particular shifted her understanding of the art of photography. She concludes: “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 anyone or anything. Every time we bring up that memory we supplant it with a new one, tinged with our present experience and perspective. It’s like a slippery fish… the more you try to hold on tight the more it gets away.”