A Poor Sort of Memory : Photobook Now Shipping →

A POOR SORT OF MEMORY has arrived! Published by Deadbeat Club, the book is the result of my deeply personal journey making photographs around my hometown in the California desert and contends with the limitations of memory and the perils of coming of age. I am very proud of this book and very grateful to Deadbeat Club for the superb collaboration. The object is beautifully printed and bound in a linen hardcover with iridescent foil stamping. Also available, is a limited special edition with a tipped-in image on the cover accompanied by a signed print in a vellum folio. All of this is enclosed in a hardbound slipcase. It’s very nice.

Books are shipping now! Yay! Get yours here.

A Poor Sort of Memory : Lenscratch Feature →

I am thrilled to have A Poor Sort of Memory featured on Lenscratch and to share a deep discussion on the making of the book and my personal history as the context and impetus for this photographic journey. I am grateful for the brilliant Sarah J Winston for the thoughtful conversation. Read the entire interview here.

“A Poor Sort of Memory transports us to the Coachella Valley of California. Throughout the book’s pages I feel an uneasiness, an ominous force, one that I cannot shake nor easily discern. The pictures feel timeless, all I can trace is the heat of the California sun. This book requests one’s contemplation, and in doing so, puts the reader right there in the landscape with the photographer. The book asks that the viewer sit closely, in companionable silence with its narrator, to go in and out of various vortexes in order to find stasis. Buckle in.” - Sarah J Winston

"It initially started with a personal journey of self inquiry in an effort to preserve my past, but the camera revealed the limited subjectivity of both memory and photography. As I revisited sites of specific memory, things would not be quite as I remembered, small details were amiss, and the camera framed more out than in. This left a gap of confusion and doubt that, although initially frustrating, opened things up for possibility. Seeing the futility in the effort of preservation I was free to follow where the work wanted to go." - TLC

“In Lewis Carrol's Through the Looking Glass, the white queen says to Alice "It's a poor sport of memory that only works backwards." It's nonsensical, yet profound. It challenges the notion that memory is fixed and only in the past. It posits that memory may work in multiple directions. We are creating memories now and planting them into the future. It's disorienting, for sure.” - TLC

“Maybe I was afraid that if I forgot my story, I would be more apt to repeat it. The irony is, the harder I tried to do this, the more elusive and flawed the memories seemed. That's when things moved beyond the personal and got interesting to me as an artist.” - TLC

“That context of your life makes me look at the portals a little differently now. Some begin to feel like oracles and spiritual passages, allowing the bending of time even more; looking back and in, changing the past through engagement with it all. It’s all pretty incredible. Thank you for sharing.” - Sarah J Winston

Montello Foundation : Residency Recap

I recently completed an artist residency for the wonderful Montello Foundation. It's a solitary retreat, totally off-grid in the desert highlands of rural Nevada. For 10 days I occupied a lovely little house with an artist's studio situated on thousands of acres of open sagebrush. I was free to roam and make work as i wished. it was awesome. And since i had zero internet, no cell reception, zilch contact to the outside world, I couldn't post about til now. So here comes a little photo dump...move on if you hate nature, especially rainbows.

Solo show at Gallery 169 in Santa Monica →

TRACY L CHANDLER : THE EDGE OF I brings together two bodies of work contending with the transience of selfhood, A POOR SORT OF MEMORY and WEIGHT OF INFINITE POSSIBILITIES. The solo show will include archival pigment prints from both bodies of work as well as screen a short film of A POOR SORT OF MEMORY that was commissioned by Le Recontres De La Photographie in Arles. The show opens at Gallery 169 on Saturday June 10th and will run through the summer.

Lenscratch Conversation : Robert Lyons →

As part of my ongoing series of conversations with photobook artists, I recently sat down with Robert Lyons to discuss his latest monograph, Zero Line Boundary with Zatara Press.

Zero Line Boundary focuses on the dividing line between Canada and the United States. This Northern Border, which is the world’s longest continuous border, is often overlooked in American culture and media, at least when compared to the highly politicized and walled border to our south. Photographing along this quiet, open, and seemingly undefended boundary, Robert Lyons uses black-and-white photographs of the area and its inhabitants to explore themes of nationhood, territory, and surveillance. Weaving together portrait and landscape photographs with thoughtful design, Zero Line Boundary assembles a quiet but complex sequence of metaphor and direct observation. Beyond his photography practice, Robert Lyons also serves as an educator and is the founding director of the Hartford Art School’s Photography MFA program. In full disclosure, he was my grad school advisor and it was nice to talk with him about his work for a change.

Click here for a full feature of our conversation.

Hopper Prize Journal Interview →

After being awarded finalist for the Hopper Prize, I was interviewed for their journal in which i discuss motivations for making work as well as upcoming projects. View the full feature at this link.

Lenscratch Conversation : Peggy Nolan →

As part of my ongoing series of conversations with photobook artists, I recently sat down with Peggy Nolan to discuss her latest monograph, Juggling is Easy with TBW Books.

“Between 1967 and 1982, I gave birth to seven children. All are still alive and not a single tattoo.” And so starts off Peggy Nolan’s latest monograph, Juggling is Easy, published by TBW Books. The first image is of a teenage girl, safety pin piercing her nostril. She challenges the camera with a cold stare, a look that mothers everywhere will recognize. But many more images follow that would normally prove elusive for the parental gaze,… make-out sessions, stolen cigarettes, bridge jumping, and mosh pits. Many of us have lived these moments, but not with our mother and her Leica in tow. With this work, Peggy Nolan has afforded us access to her specific familial drama with all its universally recognizable rights of passage. What results is not your normal heirloom scrapbook but a photobook with a searingly intimate look at a complex family and a grounded revelation of the chaos of coming of age.

Click here for a full feature of our conversation.

Lenscratch Conversation : Eli Durst →

As part of my ongoing series of conversations with photobook artists, I recently sat down with Eli Durst to discuss his latest monograph, The Four Pillars with Loose Joints.

The Four Pillars, Eli Durst’s newest photobook published by Loose Joints, grew out of a relationship with a faith-based self-help group that Durst photographed over several years. Despite their ostensibly comfortable lives, these affluent suburbanites felt unfulfilled and directionless. They met weekly in church basements to discuss spiritual and secular strategies to find meaning and purpose, and to deconstruct the markers of success, progress and identity within middle-class American society.

Durst’s staged, inventive images build organically on this self-critical base structure by inventing scenarios that interrogate the relationship between the individual and the group, the norms we aspire to, and the social gravity that holds these two in alignment. Durst takes the details of these scenarios – mundane family portraits, team bonding exercises, pregnancy groups, school gyms, amateur theater, county fairs – and amplifies their strangeness, through a lens that is at once factual, fictional, banal and absurd.

Click here for a full feature of our conversation.

Lenscratch Conversation : Andrea Modica →

As part of my ongoing series of conversations with photobook artists, I recently sat down with Andrea Modica to discuss her latest monograph, Theatrum Equorum with TIS books.

The result of more than eight years of intense work in Italy and the United States, Theatrum Equorum is acclaimed photographer Andrea Modica’s latest monograph with TIS books. As the title indicates, Modica’s interest lies in the drama of the horse – but her approach is one that completely upends expectations for such an exploration. Using her trademark 8×10 large format camera, she made these photographs at a renowned horse clinic in Bologna that attracts remarkable and often very valuable animals for a range of medical procedures including, among other things, fracture repairs, emergency colic intervention and dental work. “When I was invited to witness an operation, I was immediately drawn to the contrast of these magnificent animals rendered so vulnerable,” Modica says. “I instantly wanted to investigate with my camera.”

Click here for full feature of our conversation.

Lenscratch Conversation : Sant Khalsa →

As part of my ongoing series of conversations with photobook artists, I recently sat down with Sant Khalsa to discuss her latest monograph, Crystal Clear || Western Waters with Minor Matters Books.

In her latest monograph, Crystal Clear || Western Waters published by Minor Matters, Sant Khalsa explores the commodification of our most basic resource through the proliferation of water stores that came to prominence in the 1990s and early 2000s. These retail points-of-sale typically sold reverse osmosis filtered water in strip malls across the urban, suburban, and rural American Southwest. The series captures the varied storefronts in four Western states, including their quintessential signage, revealing the paradoxical nature of these sites as both necessary and absurd constructs of our capitalist society. Khalsa’s book is a compilation of well-reproduced silver gelatin prints that evokes both nostalgia and criticism and serves as a thought-provoking commentary on the fabrication of human desire and its impact on the environment.

Click here for a full feature of our conversation.