The process of making this work happens over several stages. The series has connections to the history of photomontage with the painterly touch of spirit photography. Soren is shooting photographs that relate to our ability to see clearly and to recognize truth.    

Pushing the surface of the photographs allows me to amplify the experiences Soren has captured in an instant.  She marks the prints by hand with paint, ink, acrylic medium and other transparent materials in her studio. Then, she reshoots the marked photographs using long exposures and various light sources: flashlights, headlamps, colored gels, or traditional studio strobes. Soren is literally drawing on the photographs with light. 

Finally, she prints the results on Hahnemühle Bartyta paper as archival pigment prints.

In some of the pictures, Soren seeks a kind of indeterminacy by making it hard to decipher what one is looking at in the finished work. There is the light in the photograph and light reflected by the hand-made markings. The pictures present the act of seeing as well as the impulse to conjure something you might imagine to be there but isn't, as when peripheral vision is filled in by our minds with some obscured image. At times, it feels like a new kind of seeing, akin to spirit photography, but at the outskirts of human reach.