Tabitha Soren
Tabitha Soren
Tabitha Soren (b. 1967, San Antonio, Texas) is an artist whose work is concerned with contemporary photographic culture and the intersection of psychology, culture, politics and the body.
Soren graduated from New York University in 1989 with a BA in Journalism and Politics and began a career in media. In 1993, she was awarded the Peabody Award for Excellence in Journalism for MTV News' coverage of the US presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and George Bush senior. During her years in New York City, she also worked for CNN, ABC News, and NBC News. In 1999, Soren was awarded a fellowship at Stanford University in California and it’s there that she shifted her visual arts practice from 30 video frames a second for television to single frame photographs.
Her work is included in the collectionse of the John Paul Getty Museum, Harvard Art Museums, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the High Museum, among others. She has published two photobooks, Fantasy Life by Aperture Books and Surface Tension by RVB Books, Paris, which was nominated for the Priox Nadar last year. Soren lives and works in Berkeley, California.
Surface Tension (2013-2021)
Tabitha Soren’s Surface Tension isolates one of the most intimate layers of our daily experience: the place where our warm animal bodies collide with the machine’s cold and boundless knowledge of the world.
Created by shooting the grime, oil and debris that accumulates on her iPad with a large format camera, the vigorous and expressive gestures on the surface of Soren’s images reflect the conflict between reality and fiction, and between our embodied selves and our online, mediated lives.
Most of us now connect with the outside world through a device in our hands, from personal networks to global events. This connection is made through the physical touching and swiping of a screen; as we endlessly scroll through a vast array of images that depict a wide variety of emotion, experience and trauma.
The human markings seen in Soren’s images are seemingly at odds with the chilly detachment and objectivity of the information that flows towards us, unrelentingly. Provoking questions about political agency in our digitally saturated world, these images also speak to the contemporary psychic state typified, as writer Jia Tolention puts it, by the ‘numb exhaustion, dull anxiety and near-automated desire’ produced by our endless scrolling.
While we might return to our screens in the interest of ‘bearing witness’, as Tolentino says: “The screen keeps us at a distance, no matter how persistently we paw at it. When we turn on our phones to absorb our daily onslaught of incoherence, we begin to slowly lose our sense of the world as something we participate in with our bodies, in a group that is capable of as-yet-unseen action, rather than alone, with our eyes and the tips of our fingers. Little by little, we cede the world to abstraction, consumption, and misuse.”
Image: Twitter_Paradise_CA_Fire, from the series Surface Tension. Image (c) Tabitha Soren 2022