Both Sides of the Camera with Photographer and Former MTV Anchor @tabithasoren
To see more of Tabitha’s photography, follow @tabithasoren on Instagram. For more music stories from around the world, head over to @music.
Tabitha Soren (@tabithasoren) is standing in a dark garage with her hands wrist-deep in photo chemicals. She’s attempting to make a tintype, an image with an old-time vintage façade developed on an aluminum plate.
“It’s definitely trial and error, even if you know the image is good, because the emulsion can get messed up,” she says. “It takes me about four tries for each one. It’s brutal.”
While the finished products will ultimately go in an exhibit, she always makes sure to post a few on her Instagram account, interspersed between pictures of her smiling children and work from previous projects.
At 47, Tabitha is a photography vet. She’s published pictures in high-profile magazines; released a photo book called Running about survival instincts; and has a current exhibit in Los Angeles, titled “Fantasy Life,” which documents a group of baseball players over a 12-year period.
Accolades aside, though, Tabitha was a late-bloomer to the photography world. Before that, she worked in a far more run-and-gun region of the media industry. As an on-air reporter and political correspondent for MTV in the ‘90s, she spoke to everyone: Tupac, Bill Clinton, Mariah Carey, George H. W. Bush, the Black Crowes.
“Your job at MTV was to take the same story and do it differently every time,” she says. “There’s a band, they have a new album out, they’re going on tour. How do I not make this sound like the 30,000 other stories that have been done on MTV in that same situation?”
Tabitha didn’t always want to be in front of the camera. As a journalism and politics double major at New York University, she was more interested in working at a newspaper. (Though, some fun trivia: Tabitha appeared in the Beastie Boys’ music video “(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)” while she was still in school. “They had no budget and I remember that the whipped cream that were in the pies they were throwing around was rancid because it was expired,” she says. “They just stole it from the back of a grocery store.”) But after school she took a job at a TV station in Vermont. Soon after, she returned to New York and was hired at MTV, having worked in college on the channel’s heavy metal forum Headbanger’s Ball. While the additional visibility was nice, it also came with intense scrutiny, from both journalists and random strangers.
“One time at a heavy metal concert I remember someone running all the way down to me,” she recalls, “and she just looked at me and screamed at me, ‘I hate you.’”
Those moments aside, Tabitha enjoyed the work, and eventually began taking pictures of her time behind the scenes.
“I was in a lot of situations where everyone was taking pictures of what I was doing,” she says. “I was at the White House, I was backstage with Johnny Cash. I was like, maybe I should take a picture. So then I just started carrying the camera around.”
She admits the photos she took then were more scrapbook-quality than anything. But it did plant a seed, one that began to sprout and bloom in her late 20s while attending Stanford on a fellowship. She soon felt the best way to express herself was not in front of a camera, but behind one.
“I felt like I had had a great run at MTV, but I felt like I was getting a little old for the channel,” she says. “I got the sense the channel was going in one direction and my interests were going in another.”
What she got was a chance to create work for an entirely new medium. She says she appreciates the singular nature of photography, particularly on her newest project, “Fantasy Life.” For her, it’s about witnessing and analyzing the motion of a subject and understanding where the energy of an image is coming from.
“It’s nice to be able to really pick apart what I am seeing in that way and not just to have to be following the action and chasing what’s in front of you,” she says. “I do think on my feet. But [being a reporter] is a very tense, hairpin-trigger existence. You always have to be right on the edge of your seat. And I don’t really have to be that way as an artist. So it suits me for this old fogey stage of my life. It was great for my 20s. It was a loud and noisy time. I could go hang out with the Black Crowes and do a story with them … and then I could go back to politics or do something in Bosnia. I have both sides to me, and I think with photography too, some of it is super dark. I am basically in all my work trying to visualize psychological states, and “Fantasy Life” comes down to showing you what it’s like to touch greatness.”
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