A short film version of A POOR SORT OF MEMORY is showing at Le Recontres De La Photographie in Arles this summer. The film debuts at the “Night of the Year” celebration and then will be screening every night of the summer as part of the “Best Of the Festival”. You can also view it online here.
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.
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.
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.
So pleased to be included in the Unbound 11 show at Candela Gallery. I love the mission of this gallery and their dedication to growing and donating the Candela Collection. My piece “Eli on Ramp” was collected by the Virginia Museum of FIne Arts.
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.
Super excited to curate a group show alongside Margaret Murphy at These Days Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. Spiral Bound will include showings from 2021 Hartford Art School Photo MFA alumns.
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.
Happy to be included in the 12th edition of FotoFilmic Journal. This edition was curated by Caroline Tompkins. You can pick up a copy at the FotoFilmic website.
An ongoing series for Lenscratch in which we profile photobook publishers. This collection serves as an excellent resource on the who, what, and how of the current photobook publishing world. This round I contributed coverage on Trespasser, Gnomic, and TBW Books.
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.”
A POOR SORT OF MEMORY has been included in the Body and Soul exhibition at the PH Museum.
An ongoing series for Lenscratch in which we profile photobook publishers. This collection serves as an excellent resource on the who, what, and how of the current photobook publishing world. This round I contributed coverage on Roman Nvmerals, Deadbeat Club, and TIS books.
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.
I am proud to be awarded the Urbanautica Institute Award and to be included among the artists featured in this year’s Urbanautica Journal of Visual Anthropology and Cultural Landscapes, in which I discuss my work and process in this interview.
From Hartford WIth Love was a fundraising initiative put together to raise funds and awareness of civil unrest during the Covid-19 Pandemic. Mico Toledo and I led the campaign with a sale of photographic prints donated by the entire legacy of Hartford Art School Photography alumni. More than 60 photographers contributed their work to the print sale and zine publication. Check out this feature on Booooooom.
A Yellow Rose Project is a photographic collaboration of responses, reflections, and reactions to the 19th Amendment from over one hundred women across the United States. I am honored to be included among the talented artists participating in this massive undertaking of exhibitions, events, and publications. Visit the website to view the work and learn more.
Lovely to speak with Jeff Schechtman about photography and memory for the California Sun Podcast. Take a listen here.
