On Monday, August 14, at 4pm, Rental Gallery, in collaboration with the Aperture Foundation, is pleased to present an artist talk and book signing with Tabitha Soren, whose Fantasy Life was released this April to critical acclaim.
In 2002, Soren first began photographing a group of minor league draft picks for the Oakland A’s—young men coming into the major league farm system straight from high school or college. Since then, she has followed the players through their baseball lives, an alternate reality of long bus rides, on-field injuries, friendships and marriages entered and exited, constant motion, and very hard work, often for very little return. Some of the subjects, like Nick Swisher and Joe Blanton, have gone on to become well-known, respected players at the highest level of the game. Some left baseball to pursue other lines of work, such as selling insurance and coal mining. Others have struggled with poverty and even homelessness.
Soren’s work centers on the aesthetic quality of both internal feelings and the photographic process; from the chaos of crashing waves to the expression of a runner mid-stride, Soren's work touches on emotions—anxiety, bliss, hopeless ambitions, motivation to succeed—that we all often feel. The end product is a photograph of quiet beauty that often contains an underlying tension between viewer and photographer. The tactile nature of her work can be felt when she stretches the medium to a point of abstraction, as seen in her tintypes of baseball players and the marks made on screens left behind by unknown users. These simple acts, such as touching a screen, quickly become beautiful collages that hover between the space of photography and self-reflection.
Fifteen years after that first shoot in 2002, the project has now become a book called Fantasy Life. It portrays a selection of these stories, gathering together a richly textured series of photographs taken on the field and behind the scenes at games, along with commentaries by the players and memorabilia from their lives—from childhood baseball card collections to x-rays of injuries. Dave Eggers contributes a five-part short story that compellingly condenses the roller-coaster ride of the minor-league every man, from youthful pursuit of stardom through the slog of endless hardscrabble games, to that moment of realization that success may not be just around the corner after all. Additionally, a number of the featured players add their own real-life experiences of trying to make it to “The Show.” Together, these elements evoke the enduring spirit of this quintessential American fantasy of making it in the major leagues.
Tabitha Soren left a successful career in television in 1999 to start another one as a photographer. Her work is included in public collections such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Cleveland Museum of Art, Berkeley Museum of Fine Arts, Oakland Museum of California; Transformer Station, Cleveland, Ohio; Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco; New Orleans Museum of Art; Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indiana; and the Ogden Museum of South-ern Art, New Orleans. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times Review of Books, Dear Dave, McSweeney’s, Vanity Fair, New York Times Magazine, Blink, Slate, New York, Sports Illustrated, California Sunday Magazine, and ESPN The Magazine.
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