Photographer Tabitha Soren

Jackson Fine Art exhibits a retrospective of Tabitha Soren’s photography.

Tabitha Soren in her studio. (Photo by Laura Plageman)

By Isadora Pennington

Tabitha Soren’s solo exhibition Relief is on show at Jackson Fine Art in Buckhead through December. Unlike any exhibition that has come before, the retrospective spans three collections and a decade of development and evolution in Soren’s career.

Her works, which often exist within the gray areas of shared human experience, explore themes of tension and connection.

“I’m always trying to visualize a psychological state,” Soren said. “The connective tissue to the three bodies of work is a certain amount of anxiety, dread, and discomfort.”

Inspiring a sense of paranoia and uncertainty, works from her Running collection feature archetypal figures in distress. As her subjects flee through settings that are both familiar and yet unknown, these images capture a sense of the perilousness of survival. Do they run from something, or are they running to a destination? Is there a looming threat just out of view?

Following Running, Soren began working on Surface Tension. Developed by experimenting with photographs of photographs and playing with the intersections of media types, these images invite the viewer to consider how viewers might engage with images through technology. Using an 8×10 film camera to document images displayed on the screen of a dirty iPad, the resulting images feature smudges and smears that distort, enhance, accentuate and sometimes seemingly threaten to completely obscure the original image. “It makes me feel like it grew over time, it stretched and it means something new. I love those pictures,” said Soren, who explained that the images exist in a sort of closed loop. “The world is 3D, you take a picture and make it 2D, and then you carve into it and turn it back into 3D.”

Soren’s most recent body of work, Relief, is on exhibition for the first time at Jackson Fine Art. In contrast to the digital-on-digital elements of Surface Tension, for these works Soren used tools to inflict damage and physically alter already printed images. The process itself is actually quite stressful as there are so many unknowns when using nontraditional means to distress her photographs, leaving little room for error.

This desire to produce subjective and evocative works that ask for engagement from the viewer is perhaps one of the most marked shifts in Soren’s lifelong pursuit of storytelling. To understand why this is such a drastic departure we must go back to the beginning. Soren’s career began in the late 80s when she was a student at NYU studying journalism and politics. In off hours she became involved with MTV which was, at the time, a powerhouse television channel for music lovers across the globe. She eventually became an on-air reporter for MTV News. She convinced the network cover the 1992 presidential elections. Soren soon became a household name.

Though the success was enjoyable, over time she found herself drawn away from news reporting. Seeking to understand the complexities of life that were deeper than the who-what-where-why of reporting.

Soren applied for and accepted a yearlong fellowship to study photography and art history at Stanford. The experience was transformative. She fell in love with the darkroom and it set her on a path of artistic exploration.

Now, some 20-odd years later, Soren spends most of her time working on collections of photographs that come to life over the course of five or more years. The slow, contemplative process of fine art photography has suited her. It allows her to be curious and playful, to experiment without predetermining the outcome. She has cultivated a life where she is able to be present with her family while simultaneously gaining the respect and recognition of the art world.

For more about the exhibition, visit jacksonfineart.com.