Don’t worry: the fingerprints on Tabitha Soren’s art are meant to be there.
In Surface Tension, at Transformer Station until Jan. 19, the Berkeley, California-based fine art photographer dives into the detachment inherent in modern communication. Soren overlays iPhone photos with the smudges our fingers leave on phone screens, cooly communing with the images from a distance.
In “Katie’s Vacation Phone Photo,” she started with a vacation snap, this one shot by her friend on a trip to see Antarctic glaciers. Soren pulled it up on an iPad her teenage son uses to play video games.
With an 8x10 camera akin to the kind Ansel Adams used in the mid-1900s, Soren captured a picture of a picture on film, her son’s smeared fingerprints visible in the final shot. “When the sweat goes on there, when I light it from the side ... the negative is picking up every tiny detail,” says Soren, also an award-winning journalist known for her MTV newscasts. Although this work spotlights often-compulsive technology use, she keeps things in perspective.
“I’m not a Luddite, and I’m not anti-tech,” she says. “But I do think it’s important to keep track of how much time you spend touching a machine, and how much time you’re spending touching a loved one.” 1460 W. 29th St., Cleveland, 216-938-5429, transformerstation.org
Tabitha Soren's Photos Examine Mindless Scrolling
In her Transformer Station exhibit, the former MTV News reporter takes a hard look at our technology dependence.
