Arthur Tress: Dream Weaver
Photography strayed away from simply documenting the real world into a realm reflecting the creator’s imagination long before the advent of Photoshop and A.I. In fact, the“directorial mode” of photography (as opposed to a “reportorial mode”) actually began in the 1850s — and became more of a movement in the 1970s with a handful of experimental photographers leading the way. One of the foremost in their ranks was Arthur Tress, whose chosen domain was the Jungian world of dreams. This exhibition is a guide to his inner world, a world of fears and fantasies, of bugbears and bêtes noires, a place best navigated by children — or by adults for whom the price of entry is a willingness to revert to a childlike state.
Perhaps why so much photography today doesn’t grab us or mean anything to our personal lives is that it fails to touch upon the hidden life of the imagination and fantasy which is hungry for stimulation. The documentary photographer supplies us with facts or drowns in humanity, while the pictorialist, avant-garde or conservative, pleases us with mere aesthetically correct compositions . . . Where are the photographs we can pray to, that will make us well again, that will scare the hell out of us?’
— Arthur Tress
Boy in T.V. Set, Roxbury, Massachusetts, 1972
Target Keeper, Royal Shooting Club, Stockholm, 1967
Girl in White Dress, Cape May, New Jersey, 1971
Man in Steam, New York, 1968
Office Workers Returning Home, New York, 1966-69
Boy in Burnt-out Furniture Store, Newark, New Jersey, 1969
Flying Dream, Queens, 1971
Boy and Sister, Montauk, New York, 1973
Flood Dream, Ocean City, New Jersey, 1971
Doctor and Patient, Bellevue Hospital, New York, 1973
Girl Collecting Goldfish, Breteuil, France, 1974
Hannah Stuart and Mother, Sag Harbor, New York, 1972
The Music Lesson, New York, 1976
My Sister and Father, New York, 1978
Girl in Painted Spotlight, New York, 1968
Bride and Groom, New York, 1970
Charlotte Olds and Rooster, Freeville, New York, 1975
Born in Brooklyn in 1940, Tress spent his teenage years making photographs of nearby Coney Island, especially its seedy and surreal amusement park. Tress recalls, “It was this discovery of an alternative lost continent that somehow paralleled my own personal sense of being radically different in both sexuality and sensibility from my fellow classmates. This also marked my earliest detection of the dissonant rupture between supposed photographic truth and the poetic potency hidden within frail factuality.”
After graduating from Bard College in 1962, Tress spent five years traveling abroad to photograph unfamiliar cultures, focusing on their private rituals. His globe-trotting took him to Asia, Africa, Europe and Mexico, where he befriended a Mayan shaman. Upon his return, Tress accepted a commission to document the impoverished people of Appalachia, where he would develop a hybrid personal style, evolving, in his words, from a “documentarian” to a “magic realist.” In short order he would become something of a shaman himself.
Tress continued to hone these ideas while working on a 1971 commission for the New York State Council on the Arts, titled Open Space in the Inner City: Ecology and the Urban Environment. The images frequently possess a psychological and dreamlike quality that foreshadows Tress’s subsequent work.
The same year, Tress began to photograph elementary school students as they acted out improvised dramas — and eventually their own daydreams and nightmares. This would turn into Tress’s iconic body of work, published as The Dream Collector. This phantasmagorical approach later extended to his adult friends and acquaintances, resulting in the 1976 book Theater of the Mind.
Tress is now in his eighth decade of making enigmatic, unsettling, unforgettable photographs. In the course of a lifetime, his stature in the photography world has migrated from the fringes to the center of current practice. He is venerated as a godfather to the “directorial mode” of staged picture-making. The subject of several dozen books and catalogs, Tress has been honored with retrospectives at museums including Oxford’s Museum of Modern Art (1986), the Corcoran Gallery (2001), and most recently the Getty Museum (2023-24). By any measure, his career is the stuff of dreams.
Number of photographs: 82
Rental fee: $8250 for eight weeks plus shipping and insurance. Additional weeks are 10 percent per week.