In Recent Photography Exhibitions, Tabitha Soren And Christy Bush Present Images That Stand Out

In a world where billions of images are taken and uploaded to the Internet each day, to be consumed by a society addicted to screens, it has become harder than ever for a photograph to stand out in any sort of meaningful way.

Both Tabitha Soren and Christy Bush, photographers who each closed solo exhibitions at Laney Contemporary in Savannah, Georgia, on March 25, are aware of this conundrum. “It’s very hard to take unique images that haven’t been seen already,” says Soren, who began her career as a reporter for MTV, ABC and CBS in the 1990s, and transitioned to a career in fine art photography after studying at Stanford University in 1997.

“I have to take a lot of courage to feel ok with the fact that there is a style to my work, and there are other people who do work like me,” says Bush, who began her career as a fashion photographer and has spent the last few decades building a body of work in the South, where she is now located. (Currently, Bush is based in Asheville, North Carolina, but has spent much of her time in Athens, Georgia.)

What both sets Bush and Soren’s photographs apart from the deluge of imagery is the devotion to exploring the medium inherent in their practices; and also, the unique position of the exhibition context, where photographs are invited to be contemplated rather than merely swiped past.

Although both Bush and Soren ran in similar circles at the beginnings of their careers — “Apparently we once met at a party in Los Angeles during the MTV era,” Bush recalls – they had never met before their work was shown in tandem first at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta, and more recently, at Laney Contemporary. They did not collaborate on any artworks, nor did they discuss how they would curate their exhibitions. But the two solo shows — Soren’s was called “Relief,” and Bush’s was called “Familiar” — interacted nonetheless. Both full of beautiful imagery depicting girls, serene landscapes and intimate portraits, among other subjects, to read the identity of each artist in her own body of work required closer scrutiny.

Soren’s entire photography career is, in a way, a reaction to her career as a television journalist. Back when she was reporting on presidential election and pop culture events, she worked with vast teams of camera people, publicists and handlers. “The more successful I got in journalism, the more likely the nuance of whatever I was trying to capture would end up on the cutting room floor,” she says. As an artist, she likes that she can present a subjective version of the truth. “The truth is a deep, complicated layered experience that everyone brings their own baggage into,” she says. “That’s what I’m trying to get at in my work.”

In “Relief,” Soren presented three separate series. “Running,” a body of work that shows people, including Sore’s daughter Quinn, running away from the camera in landscapes otherwise devoid of people; “Surface Tension,” which are photographs of photographs displayed on Soren’s iPad screen, obscured in part by the greasy fingerprints and smudges left behind by the indexical trace of the fingers that swiped across them; and “Relief,” a series of prints that have been punctured and altered by bottle caps, paper cuts and burn marks, among other instruments. “I wanted to make photographs I hadn’t seen before,” Soren says. “By cutting and carving the relief work, I felt like it was a way to express an emotion or loneliness or a dashed hope or some sort of respite or relief that I hadn’t seen before in a picture.” Hung in the exhibition, these interventions, which Soren experiments with dozens of times before she gets the effect she wants, lose some of their energy. “I like how calm they appear,” Soren says. “But the making of them is not calm.”

Bush’s exhibition, “Familiar,” was culled from a book of the same name that was published by Bitter Southerner Publishing in 2021. The book features more than 180 photographs; the exhibition features 18. Subjects including Bird, a teenage girl, and Tia, a black woman based in Athens, Georgia, appear multiple times. So does Michael Stipe and Helena Christensen, both of whom are close friends of Bush. Bush says that her strength as a photographer lies in her patience. For example, she met Bird when she was only 11, and has continued to photograph her for the past seven years. “I’m very impatient as a daily human being,” Bush says. “But it has been nice to keep at the work and realize how much restraint I actually do have to let these projects go and go and go and go.” Ideally, Bush will continue to photograph Bird, and many of her other subjects throughout their lifetimes.

At their best, the works in both exhibitions are laden with stories that propel the imagination. Bush’s photograph Tia and Mr. Wilson (2018), for example, show Tia, still in the process of transitioning genders, getting her hair cut at a local barber shop. There’s an entire world to be pieced together on the wall behind her, which is full of photographs and signs including one that reads, “Money can’t buy happiness but it sure can make misery more enjoyable!” “[My subjects] like being seen not in a way that they need to be a celebrity or a superstar, but just that they want to be witnessed in their daily lives,” Bush says. With Tia, Bush says, she wanted to open a window into the “New South,” where the LGBTQ+ community no longer needs to be underground. “I’d much rather have Tia on the cover of a magazine than a model I hire from an agency,” Bush says.

In Quinn, 04448-12 (2009), Soren captures her daughter, wearing a Disney princess nightgown, running down a dirt road into the blackness of early morning, her sun-bleached hair streaming behind her. It’s a vision every mother on earth has witnessed, both in real life and in subconscious states. In Emailed Kiss Goodnight (2016), which is from the series “Surface Tension,” Soren’s daughter blows a kiss to the camera. Her lips and hands are peppered with fingerprints that look like soap bubbles. To get the fingerprints on her screen for the series, Soren divulges that she used to ask her son to play video games on her iPad. “I would call him from the driveway and ask him to just play video games while he was going through puberty, and had extremely sweaty hands,” she says. “If you combine the dopamine effects of playing those video games, with his own hormonal biology, you get a lot of debris.”

Where the photographs fail is perhaps in the context that elevates them. A gallery has only so much space for prints but witnessing a few images of Bird and Tia makes you want to see thousands of them. And all the despair and creativity that went into the interventions made in “Relief” are lost when you see them hanging so prettily in a gallery. Only if you close your eyes can you imagine a room filled with all the detritus and failure that resulted from Soren’s many experimentations.

Which may explain, in part, why we’re so drawn to the deluge on our screens. The volume and the speed allow for all of the mess of human existence to eddy and flow in our consciousness. When you take an image out of the flow, and you hang it on a wall, you create distance between it and the viewer. In order to speak, it needs to absolutely scream. Which may very well account for the reason why so many more people use Instagram than attend photography exhibitions in museums and galleries.