Tracy L Chandler

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

I am a photographic artist based in Los Angeles, CA. My work draws from personal history—using portraiture, landscape, and narrative to contend with broader notions of memory, identity, and perception. I’m especially interested in how photography mediates experience—how it both focuses and distorts, preserves and transforms. I grew up in the California desert and return to make my work there. I revisit sites tied to formative memories, using these charged landscapes as a prompt for psychological and artistic inquiry. These locations simultaneously heighten my sensitivity to both the past and the present, bridging my inner experiences with the tangible world around me. I photograph within these spaces, sometimes building sculptural interventions or involving family members and others I encounter along the way. Photography, for me, is an act of storytelling. Beyond image creation, I am very involved in editing and sequencing—selecting what to include and how images relate to one another. I often gather material over months or years, working slowly to build complexity and meaning. The resulting image series becomes a loose narrative of photographic fiction. Recent projects have included A Poor Sort of Memory, retracing my childhood experience of growing up through family trauma; The Weight of Infinite Possibilities, an ongoing typological series of portraits of adolescents; and Water / Time, a 24-hour meditation at the source of water for my hometown. While each body of work...

Artwork