Out Of Touch

A new show by Tabitha Soren visually highlights what we lose with technology.

- Mary Kaye Schilling

ABOUT FIVE YEARS AGO, TABITHA SOREN WAS ON a plane attempting to read a book on her iPad. The “super annoying” glare from the overhead light was making it hard to decipher the words, illuminating, instead, the graphic marks created by her hand as she swiped the screen to move from page to page. “I thought, Oh, this sort of looks like a new version of a painting by Franz Kline,’” Soren tells Newsweek. “There might be something here.”

Soren, an early MTV News reporter (notable for, among other things, interviewing Bill Clinton more than any other reporter in his eight years in office), has, for over 10 years, been engaged in a second career as a fine art photographer. Looking at the Kline-esque smudges got her thinking about a new series, which commenced after a few false starts. She began by shooting the surface of iPad screens with a Hasselblad, producing “delicate and serene” silver gelatin prints in her darkroom. “I thought, You know what, these aren’t a new version of Franz Kline, they’re a poor man’s version of Franz Kline,” Soren says with a laugh. “I’m going to have to bring this to another level.”

Two years later, she had switched to color and to including the iPad’s background images, rather than just the trails of physical contact we leave on our screens. “Once I did that, I felt like I was dealing with something I hadn’t seen before. It was also a lot more contemporary, with the edge and the conflict that I feel in my head when I’m struggling to keep up with the demands of technology, or fighting with my son to get off technology.” (That would be Walker, one of her three children with the non-fiction writer Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and the current best-seller The Fifth Risk.)