Tracy L Chandler
Heidi: You talk about the desert as a ‘silent character’. How do you think it’s harshness and beauty influenced the emotional language of the images, beyond simply being your physical past?
Tracy: The desert is both a container and a character in this work. I grew up there. I breathed that air, I was shaped by that light. It’s in me.
What makes the desert so particular as a photographic subject is the way it refuses neutrality. The light alone can shift from oppressive to tender within a couple of hours. At high noon it obliterates everything. It’s so vast and so harsh that it becomes almost claustrophobic, which I know sounds contradictory, but there’s something about that relentless, unforgiving openness that offers no refuge, no shade, no place to hide. You can’t escape it. That sense of being exposed and trapped at the same time, that was the emotional texture of growing up there. But then at the edges of the day, that soft pastel window at dusk, the desert can feel like the most gentle thing. And then at night it gets strange. There’s this deep black with nothing in the distance to emit or reflect light. Everything just falls into the absolute unknown. I think that swing between beauty and threat is the same emotional range I was navigating as a kid. The desert didn’t just inform the pictures’ content and aesthetics. It became the psychological language of the work.
How do you wrestle with time’s passage and nature’s relentlessness in shaping how we feel and remember? Here I was thinking about time as a photographic element and how you created portals for us to explore….or simply put, how do you approach photographing time?
Time in the desert is genuinely strange. The natural environment is so prehistoric and durable. Any trace of humanity just accumulates dust and holds its shape for decades. So when I’d return to a site from my adolescence, the architecture or object often hadn’t changed. But I had. Time had changed me. And now my memory of those places wasn’t the same as what I was looking at. So what you get is this uncanny collision where the present physical reality clashes with the ghost of your past experience of it. And then to photograph it morphs the perception once again.
I tried to honor that strangeness by working slowly. I use a large format camera, which forces you to be deliberate and spend real time in a place. And I’d return to the same sites over years, letting meaning accumulate rather than looking and moving on.
The portals and other constructed objects in the work were my way of using symbology to make time and transformation visible as a concept. A door in the middle of nowhere is absurd. It asks a question… What is on the other side? For me those objects function as portals in the most literal sense, apertures between past and present, between what I remember and what actually exists and what could be in the future.
You noted photography is a “fraction of truth,” what does photography fail to capture in this work, and how might that failure be as meaningful as what is shown or remembered?
Photography only records a surface, a fraction of a second, framing more out than in. I knew this going in but the full weight of it hit me hard on this project specifically, because I wasn’t just grappling with photography’s limits in the abstract, I was living them.
Years before I began this work, a storage unit fire took everything. Every photograph I had ever made. All of my family albums. And the photographs I had of my father, who died when I was seven. All I had left of him visually were my own memories, which are unreliable and fading. So I went back to the desert to make new photographs, partly to replace that lost archive, but what I came away with looks nothing like what I lost. What I made is not a document of my story. It’s more like a fiction based on a true story. And strangely, it feels more true to me than the literal photographs ever could have.
That’s the paradox I keep circling. Photography’s failure to capture the full truth created the space for something more emotionally honest to emerge. The fire took away a whole version of history and forced me to reconstruct. I had to invent. And what I built is mine in a way that a documentary record never could have been.
How does your personal narrative intersect with broader cultural or socio-economic narratives of the American desert (e.g., displacement, development, tourism, climate)?
I grew up in Palm Springs, which is a strange place to be from. It was built as a playground for Hollywood elites and retired snowbirds, gated communities, golf courses, tennis clubs, designed for people who were passing through or escaping, not for the people who actually lived there year-round. My family was not wealthy. We were locals on the fringe, and I always felt like an outsider in my own hometown, a kind of reversed displacement. So when I photograph, I’m not photographing Palm Springs the brand. I’m in the peripheral spaces of my youth, the dry lake beds, and makeshift shelters at the margins, places that hold a different story. One of people who couldn’t afford the fantasy. And maybe that’s a class narrative as much as a personal one.
And then there’s the land itself. The Coachella Valley is in the middle of a desert. It only exists the way it does because of massive water infrastructure, aqueducts that pull water from hundreds of miles away. The whole thing is precarious at best. Climate is not an abstraction here. As I photograph, I’m aware that this landscape has its own timeline that dwarfs all of our efforts to control it, and hoarding these resources will prove unsustainable.
I didn’t set out to make a political project, but I think those tensions are in the work. I think personal work does that. We can’t escape being part of the whole.
What does the title A Poor Sort of Memory suggest about the reliability of memory?
The title comes from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, where the White Queen tells Alice: “It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.” On its face that’s nonsensical. How else would memory work? But that’s exactly what makes it interesting. Carroll is suggesting that memory doesn’t have to be fixed or unidirectional. It can work forward. It can be circular. The past doesn’t just recede behind you, it’s also present, maybe even ahead of you in ways you haven’t recognized yet.
For me, “poor” doesn’t just mean unreliable. It means limited, insufficient, sad. When I first started making this work I was trying to recover something fixed, to return to a static past and document it. What I found instead was that the past kept shifting under my feet. My childhood home was much smaller than I remembered. Specific locations looked nothing like my mental image of them. The camera kept showing me how partial and warped my version of events was.
So the title is both a confession and a provocation. Yes, my memory is poor, unreliable, incomplete, distorted by time and trauma. But maybe that instability is what makes memory a living thing rather than an archive. It keeps reshaping itself in response to who you are now. That’s actually how we survive.
How does the inclusion of human figures, such as your son, affect your interpretation of the narrative? Are they bridges from past to present, self reflective metaphors or memories? I was thinking about the ramp image here…
All of those things at once, which is what makes it complicated.
Eli (my son) wasn’t part of the original plan. I started making this work alone, out in the desert, and then COVID hit and there was no school, and suddenly I was bringing a tweenager on my photography trips. I was initially annoyed, I was in work mode and now I had to be in mom mode, and those felt like incompatible states. But then I turned around and saw him sitting on top of this old motorcycle ramp in the middle of nowhere, and something shifted. It was like a Hitchcock zoom. I looked at him and I saw myself as a kid. I saw my father. He loved motorcycles, he died in a motorcycle accident, I had lost every photograph of him in the storage fire, and here was this ramp in the landscape he would have loved. And in one frame I had all three of us: him, me, my dad. Past, present, and future all collapsed into each other.
Eli became a child guide, a protagonist to lead me through my own story. But the closer I got, the more he resisted it, and I think that resistance was honest and important. He wasn’t going to simply be a vessel for my projections. He’s his own person. And that pushing back, that refusal to stay still as a symbol, that became part of the work too. The mother-and-son dynamic folded back on itself and complicated everything, which is exactly right for a project about the instability of memory.
There’s also Uncle Bill in the work — this adult male figure who carries both the longing for a father and the menace of the stepfather simultaneously. Longing and danger. That’s a pretty exact description of what it felt like to be a kid in my house growing up. Together they hold this protagonist-antagonist tension throughout the work. There’s a sense of chasing ghosts and evading monsters.
Which places in your work feel most alive — and which felt like ghosts and why? Did reframing meaningful events act as a release or allow you to heal?
The places that felt most alive were the edge spaces, concrete washes, the end of a dirt road, etc. There was still a charge in those places. The isolation, the sense of potential danger and freedom existing right next to each other felt like a homecoming of sorts, even if it was an uncomfortable one.
And then there were the objects. Found things, constructed things, totems I placed in the landscape. Those became some of the most alive moments in the work for me, because an object in the right context stops being a thing and starts being a symbol. It opens up. It becomes a portal into something larger than itself, a way into a story that language alone couldn’t access. That’s where I felt most free as a photographer, in that space between the literal and the symbolic.
As for healing, I want to resist that framing a little. I don’t think this work healed anything or released anything in a clean sense. What it did was build complexity. It gave me a more nuanced relationship to my own history. I came to understand that memory isn’t a fixed record, it’s a living thing, and the only constant in it is change. It’s something more like making peace with ambiguity.
Now that you’ve had distance on the project – what have you learned about yourself as a creative? Or what surprised you?
The thing that surprised me most was the gap between what I set out to make and what the work actually wanted to be. The pictures I felt sure about at first weren’t the ones that lasted. The quieter, stranger, slightly-off images were the ones that kept creeping up on me over time and revealing more meaning the longer I sat with them.
That taught me something real about patience and about listening, to the pictures, to the place, to the process itself. The best images in this project are NOT the ones I planned. They arrived sideways. And I think that’s true of creative work more broadly: you have to make your way toward the thing you don’t know you’re looking for. You may have to be wrong first. I’m still learning to trust that.
