Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Photography, sculpture
Website: tabithasoren.com
Tabitha Soren was born in 1967 in San Antonio, Texas, and spent her childhood moving among seven U.S. states, Germany, and the Philippines as part of a military family. She graduated from New York University in 1989 and went on to a high-profile career in television journalism, most notably as an MTV News correspondent, where her Choose or Lose campaign coverage earned a Peabody Award, followed by reporting stints at ABC News and NBC News.
In 1999, after two decades in broadcast journalism, Soren left television to pursue photography full-time, undertaking a fellowship at Stanford University that year. She settled permanently in Berkeley, California, where she has lived and worked ever since. Over the following twenty-five years she built a photographic practice that carries forward the investigative instincts of her journalism career, turning them toward long-term, deeply reported bodies of work.
Soren’s photographs are held in more than twenty public collections, including the National Gallery of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Her book Surface Tension (RVB Books, 2021) received a Prix Nadar nomination from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and she has held residencies with Facebook, Oxbow School of Art, and Local Language Art in Oakland.
Soren works across straight photography, tintype, and photo-based sculpture, often returning to a single subject for years or even decades at a time. Her defining project, Fantasy Life, tracked a class of Oakland A’s minor-league draft picks for fifteen years, using the tension between athletic aspiration and its statistical unlikelihood — only about six percent of draftees reach the majors — as a lens on luck, ambition, and the American dream. The series pairs large-format prints and unique tintypes with sculptural objects, including one made from bone spurs surgically removed from the players’ bodies.
Across her work, Soren is preoccupied with control and its absence: the psychological and bodily toll of trying to manage what cannot be managed. In Surface Tension, she photographed the fingerprints and smudges left on iPad and phone screens under raking light with an 8x10 view camera, turning the residue of touch into large-scale, almost topographic images. In Relief, she physically cuts, burns, blasts, and carves into photographic paper to push flat images into three dimensions, collapsing the boundary between photograph, painting, and relief sculpture. Whether the subject is a minor-league ballplayer or a smartphone screen, her pictures return again and again to the body as a record of vulnerability, striving, and endurance.
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