Tabitha Soren

Artist Statement:

For the past two and a half years, my Running series has taken me from my home in California to twelve states, Mexico and Canada in search of willing subjects. The only casting requirement for the series was that the people could run. In this series, I’m attempting to acknowledge the world unseen beyond the frame, while caging my subjects inside. When people are running, their bodies contort and we get to glimpse emotions that are normally hidden. The fight or flight response is something each of us can connect with. Yet, the cause and effect of what is happening in each Running picture remains a mystery. I’m inviting viewers to mine their own secrets to expand on each picture's narrative. I want them to participate. The role of accident in life, panic and resilience are consistent themes in my work and sometimes all three arise during one shoot. For example, for Running 000516, my next-door neighbor, an opera singer, came out of the water with her body covered in flesh-colored leeches. I had no idea leeches came in any other color than black so naturally, a surge of horror and guilt came over me for what I had just put her through. However, because the singer had grown up on a Bay Area commune, she said, “Oh yeah, this has happened before,” and casually plucked them off one by one with her towel.

I was born into a military family and grew up all over the world. Snapshots were one of the few ways I had to remember the details that made up my childhood in the last town or base — so I took them incessantly and spent many afternoons cataloguing them. I headed to New York for college where I received a BA in Journalism and Politics at New York University. After a career in television news shooting 30 frames a second, I decided she wanted to concentrate on one frame at a time and spent a year studying photography at Stanford University. Over the past ten years, my projects have been published in The New York Times Magazine, Canteen, Vanity Fair and New York, among others. My work speaks to the twists of fate in life that can unhinge us. I want my pictures to address what havoc human beings can survive — and what they can't. Public collections include the Oakland Museum of Art, in California, the New Orleans Museum of Art as well as the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, both in Louisiana. My Running series debuted at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Indianapolis this summer and was also shown at the Klompching Gallery in New York City.