A Poor Sort of Memory is Tracy L. Chandler’s debut monograph, published by Deadbeat Club in 2024, and its premise is deliberately unsettled. Chandler returned to her hometown in the California desert with mixed feelings, revisiting the concrete washes and rock shelters that once served as refuges from a chaotic family home. What she found there was not resolution but friction: the composure of a spare desert landscape set against a remembered climate of confinement.

The book takes its title from the White Queen’s remark to Alice, and Chandler uses it as a working method rather than a flourish. Rather than claim that photographs recover what happened, she works as an unreliable narrator, treating the residue of her past as raw material for a photographic fiction. Memory and fantasy, reflection and projection, are allowed to blur. The pictures do not illustrate a story so much as test whether the story holds.

Chandler works across portraiture, landscape and narrative, allowing personal experience to shape how a place is encountered. The desert is therefore more than a setting for recollection: its apparent openness can coexist with the sense of being trapped that she associates with her youth. Reading the photographs together makes that discrepancy tangible without requiring every image to disclose an autobiographical event. Her return becomes a study of how a familiar place can remain difficult to understand.

Published in 2024, the standard Deadbeat Club edition presents 108 pages in a linen hardcover with iridescent foil stamping and full-colour offset printing. The distinction between the book’s physical clarity and its uncertain recollections gives collectors a useful point of entry. This debut belongs in a conversation about contemporary American photography of place and memory: a book in which returning to the site of a story can unsettle that story. It was a finalist in the Traditional category of the 2024 Lucie Photo Book Prize.