Tabitha Soren’s Surface Tension intervenes into our cool, disembodied, transactional relationships with digital devices—and meddles with the “neutrality” of the information we receive through them. Soren shoots iPad screens with an 8x10 view camera under raking light to reveal the grime we leave behind—the fingerprints and greasy smears of our embodied selves, so seemingly at odds with the chilly detachment and objectivity of the information that flows toward us, unrelentingly. The photographs are titled simply as URLs, bringing viewers back to the “original” of the image. Rendered with painterly detail, the project considers “how people consume, manipulate, dismiss, cherish, interact with image-driven content online—and the relentless layering that accompanies this experience.”

Soren (b.1967) is a former Peabody Award-winning journalist for MTV and NBC news. Her photographs are held in many private and public collections, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum of Photography, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Oakland Museum of California, and San Francisco’s Pier 24. Soren lives and works in the Bay Area.