The program will begin at 7pm. Following the lecture, copies of the Surface Tension monograph will be available for sale and signing.
This is a ticketed event; $5 admission for members of the Atlanta History Center and $10 for non-members.
In celebration of this collaboration, new members of the Atlanta History Center may purchase an annual membership using the code SOREN10 and receive $10 off their new membership and complimentary admission to the event.
A visual artist in different domains for over twenty-five years, Tabitha Soren has long explored the intersection of psychology, culture, politics, and the body. A former reporter for MTV News, ABC News, and NBC News, Soren begins each new series using the methodical investigative tools she used during her time in journalism. Books, research studies, and statistics lay a necessary analytical foundation for the visual ideas she communicates. These data points then merge with her experiences growing up in a military family, spending her youth moving around the world and adjusting to the cultural differences, social structures, and visual cues that came with each relocation.
For her most recent series Surface Tension, which she began in 2014, Soren shines raking light on a dirty iPad screen, capturing and reimagining the found images underneath with her 8x10 film camera. The resulting body of work evokes the particular mediation of our historical moment — the collision of our human bodies with what Jia Tolentino calls in The New Yorker the “cold and infinite knowledge of the world.”
In conversation with Soren will be International Head of Photographs for Christie’s auction house, Darius Himes.
About the Author
Soren was born in 1967 in San Antonio, Texas and lived in 7 U.S. states, Germany and the Philippines during her formative and adolescent years. She received her degree in 1989 from New York University and was awarded a fellowship from Stanford University in 1997. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at Mills College Art Museum, Oakland, CA; Transformer Station, Cleveland, OH; The Davis Museum, Wellesley, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis, IN; Oakland Museum of California, and others. Select group exhibitions include Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA; The Worcester Art Museum, MA; Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Aperture Gallery, New York, NY; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; Dorsky Gallery, New York, NY; Amarillo Museum of Art, Amarillo, TX; Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN; The Photographer’s Gallery, London, UK; the New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; and the Ogden Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA.
Soren’s work is in many private and public collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; The New Orleans Museum of Art, LA; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; the Oakland Museum of California; The George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY; The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, CA; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, CA; and The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Her images have been featured in Hyperallergic, the Washington Post, California Sunday Magazine, ArtNews, Newsweek, and the Guardian, and publications include Fantasy Life (Aperture), Trace (Yoffy Press) and Surface Tension (RVB Books). She currently lives and works in San Francisco, California.
About the Moderator
Based in New York City and having joined Christie’s in 2014, Darius Himes oversees a global team producing auctions, exhibitions and catalogues as International Head of the Photographs department. During his time at Christie’s, Himes interviewed Sir Elton John and David Mirvish in 2016 about their long love of photography and work with the Elton John AIDS Foundation. In August of 2017, Christie’s announced a major deaccession of photographs from The Museum of Modern Art.
Prior to joining Christie’s, Himes was director of Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco from 2011–2014, working closely with their roster of artists and publications. In 2007 he co-founded Radius Books, a non-profit publisher of books on photography and the visual arts, where he still serves on the Board.
Himes was the founding editor of photo-eye Booklist, a quarterly journal devoted to photography books, which was published from 2002–2007. A lecturer and writer, he has contributed to Aperture, The Photobook Review, Blind Spot, Bookforum, FOAM and BOMB.
Presented in partnership with Jackson Fine Art and Atlanta Celebrates Photography.
Promotional language provided by publisher.