What do you do with the rest of your life when you’ve become a TV star and an icon for a generation at age 23? Tabitha Soren and MTV news were to the 90s Presidential campaigns what Twitter was to Obama. After running around covering President Clinton, she married a superstar writer (Michael Lewis), won a prestigious journalism fellowship at Stanford (the Knight), and had three kids.
Like any super-smart, accomplished woman, she understandably didn’t want to lose her self in her family life, or in the shadow of her husband’s fame. For ten years now, she’s been crafting carefully constructed still images–not photojournalism, but beautiful fine art. Her work has accompanied stories written by her husband in the NY Times Magazine, and has hung in museums.
We met this week at the art gallery here in Los Angeles that’s displaying her latest series — large, crisp, haunting images of people running in startling locations that look like they could be freeze frames of chase scenes from artful films.
With “Running,” she was, she told me, “making primal photographs in a society that’s not.” Photography in general, and these images in particular, she said, give “a chance to open ourselves up to our own deep internal life.”