Background and career
Tabitha Soren (born August 19, 1967) is an American photographer, visual artist and former television journalist. She began her career in broadcast journalism, working for MTV News, CNN, ABC News and NBC News, before moving into fine-art photography. Her photographic work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally and is held in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including the National Gallery of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Harvard Art Museums and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
Soren was born in San Antonio, Texas, in 1967. She graduated from New York University in 1989 with a degree in journalism and politics. While a student at New York University, Soren appeared in the 1987 music video for "(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)" by the Beastie Boys. The video also featured several other cameos, including LL Cool J. Soren began working in television news in the late 1980s. During her early career she worked at CNN, where she performed production and reporting duties, before joining MTV. A 1993 profile in the Los Angeles Times described her work at MTV as including reporting, writing, producing and editing. At MTV News, Soren became particularly associated with political reporting aimed at younger audiences. She was a prominent participant in MTV's Choose or Lose campaign during the 1992 United States presidential election, interviewing political figures and reporting on the campaigns of Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush. The campaign received a Peabody Award for excellence in journalism in 1993. Her political reporting included interviews with figures such as Hillary Clinton, Anita Hill and Yasser Arafat. Soren subsequently worked for ABC News and NBC News. She also appeared periodically on Today during her television career. Her interviews with musicians became part of her later public profile. Footage of an interview with Tupac Shakur was included in the 2003 documentary film Tupac: Resurrection. Soren also appeared as herself in the films The Cable Guy (1996) and Contact (1997).
In 1997, Soren was selected as a Knight Fellow at Stanford University. During her fellowship, Soren shifted her visual practice from television production toward still photography. She has described the change as moving from working with approximately 30 video frames per second to making individual photographic frames. Soren has said that photography allowed her to explore emotional and psychological subjects in ways that differed from the demands of television journalism. Her subsequent work has frequently examined the relationship between psychology, culture, politics, the body and photographic representation. She has also experimented with the physical properties of photographic images, incorporating sculptural and painterly processes into her work and exploring the uncertainty of photographic representation.
Soren's photographs have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, New York, McSweeney's, The New Yorker and other publications. Her photographic projects have included Running, Fantasy Life, Panic Beach, Surface Tension, Uprooted, Relief, Weathering and Motherload.
Soren's Running series was produced over approximately three years and was photographed in 15 U.S. states as well as Mexico and Canada. The project depicts individuals running through ordinary environments and uses dramatic lighting and isolated compositions. The series was exhibited at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art in 2012 and subsequently at Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles in 2013.
Soren began photographing a group of Oakland Athletics minor-league draft selections in 2002. She followed the players over approximately 15 years, documenting their careers and lives as they moved through professional baseball. The resulting project, Fantasy Life, depicts both the professional and personal circumstances of the players, including their experiences of success, injury, financial hardship and leaving professional baseball. The project was first exhibited at Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles in 2015. A major exhibition followed at San Francisco City Hall in 2017, where more than 180 photographs were displayed. In 2017, Aperture Foundation published Fantasy Life: Baseball and the American Dream, featuring Soren's photographs and text by Dave Eggers.
