Tabitha Soren in conversation with Corey Keller
SFAC Galleries is pleased to bring together two exceptional women—photographer Tabitha Soren and curator Corey Keller—in an expansive conversation exploring practice, process, and the challenges of working with images in the world today.
Tabitha Soren left a career in television in 1999 to start another as a photo-based artist. Her work visualizes psychological states; the internal weather that storms though each of us and the twists of fate in life that can unhinge us. In the past 12 months, her work has been exhibited in Boston, New York, Dallas, Tulsa, Pittsburgh and currently in San Francisco City Hall as part of the San Francisco Arts Commission exhibition program. Public collections include the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, the George Eastman Museum, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Oakland Museum of Art, Transformer Station, Pier 24 Photography, New Orleans Museum of Art and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. Her first monograph, FANTASY LIFE, was published last spring by Aperture. Her photography has been featured in The New Yorker, on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, in Vanity Fair, the Paris Review, New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and California Sunday Magazine among others. She lives and works in Berkeley. www.tabithasoren.com
Corey Keller is curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she has been on staff since 2003. During her tenure at SFMOMA, she has organized numerous exhibitions, including Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840–1900 (2008), which explored the use of photography in nineteenth-century science, the traveling retrospective, Francesca Woodman (2011), and About Time: Photography in a Moment of Change (2016), the inaugural presentation of the photography collection in SFMOMA’s new building. Most recently, Keller organized an exhibition of the photographic maps of Sohei Nishino (2017), and is currently at work on the first survey of the nineteenth-century photographer J.B. Greene as well as the first full-scale retrospective of the work of Dawoud Bey, both scheduled for 2019. In addition to several SFMOMA publications, Keller has contributed scholarly essays on Jay DeFeo, Eadweard Muybridge, Larry Sultan, and Carleton Watkins, among others. A frequent public speaker, she co-organized the symposium “Is Photography Over?” in 2010 and the follow-up in 2016, entitled, “The Photographic Event.” In addition to her curatorial work, she enjoys teaching, and has taught at Stanford, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the California College of the Arts. She received her BA in American Studies from Yale University, and her MA in Art History from Stanford.
