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Arthur TressBoy in Mickey Mouse Hat, Coney Island, New York1968
1968
About the Item
Vintage gelatin silver print
Signed and dated twice, verso
Also inscribed in black ink, verso
Various studio stamps and printing instructions, verso
This artwork is offered by ClampArt, located in New York City.
Arthur Tress is one of the most eminent and consistently imaginative, photographers of his generation, which includes Duane Michals and Jerry Uelsmann. His style originated in the 1960s when surrealist, staged photography ruled. But Tress evolved a style all his own that is both dreamlike and formally composed out of contemporary subject matter. He takes everyday objects and subverts their function so that they become something of myth, holding a quixotic, playful meaning. Magic, theater, and fantasy are the markers in his unique works. About photography’s potential, he has written, “So much of today’s photography doesn’t ‘grab us’ or mean anything to our personal lives.… It fails to touch upon the hidden life of the imagination which is hungry for stimulation. The documentary photographer supplies us with facts or drowns us in humanity, while the pictorialists please us with mere aesthetically correct compositions. But where are the photographs we can pray to, that will make us well again, or scare the hell out of us?”
From the very start of his career, Tress demonstrated an understanding of photography’s potential to transform the mundane into the fantastic. His images are from the natural world, but are inundated with symbolism and strange juxtapositions. The photographer invites us into a dream world that can be playful yet threatening. Images abound filled with weapons and saws, machines, and ruins. Both the children and the male nudes in his photographs are rarely portrayed at rest or in formal portraits. They are rather engaged in modern tableaux acting out symbols of modern life, a pretend world with violence and mystery ever at hand. In the reviews of his major Corcoran retrospective he was dubbed “a national treasure,” fitting for a photographer who captures symbolically so wide a range of modern life. Tress’s work is collected by major museums around the world, including the Whitney Museum of American Art; George Eastman House; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Art, Houston; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
- Creator:Arthur Tress (1940, American)
- Creation Year:1968
- Dimensions:Height: 14 in (35.56 cm)Width: 11 in (27.94 cm)
- Medium:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:New York, NY
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU93233993001
Arthur Tress
Born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 24, 1940, Arthur Tress began his first camera work as a teenager in the surreal neighborhood of Coney Island where he spent hours exploring the decaying amusement parks. Later, during five years of world travel, mostly in Asia and Africa, he developed an interest in ethnographical photography that eventually led him to his first professional assignment as a U.S. government photographer recording the endangered folk cultures of Appalachia. Seeing the destructive results of corporate resource extraction, Tress began to use his camera to raise environmental awareness about the economic and human costs of pollution. Focusing on New York City, he began to photograph the neglected fringes of the urban waterfront with a straight documentary approach. This gradually evolved into a more personal mode of “magic realism” combining improvised elements of actual life with stage fantasy that became his hallmark style of directorial fabrication. In the late 1960s Tress was inspired to do a series based upon children’s dreams that combined his interests in ritual ceremony, Jungian archetypes, and social allegory. Later bodies of work dealing with the hidden dramas of adult relationships and the reenactments of male homosexual desire evolved from this primarily theatrical approach. Beginning in the early 1980s, Tress began shooting in color, creating room-sized painted sculptural installations out of found medical equipment in an abandoned hospital on New York’s Welfare Island. This led to a smaller scale exploration of narrative still life within a children’s toy theater and a portable nineteenth-century aquarium. Around 2002, Tress returned to gelatin silver, exploring more formalist themes in the style of mid- century modernism, often combining a spontaneous shooting style with a constructivist’s sense of architectural composition and abstract shape. In addition to images of California skateboard parks, his recent work includes the round images of the series Planets and the diamond-shaped images of Pointers. Selected Arthur Tress Books and Publications Open Space in the Inner City: Ecology and the Urban Environment. New York: New York State Council on the Arts, 1971. Arthur Tress: The Dream Collector. Text by John Minahan. Richmond: Westover, 1972, New York: Avon, 1974. Shadow. A Novel in Photographs. New York: Avon, 1975 Theater of the Mind. Text by Duane Michaels, Michel Tournier and A.D. Coleman. Dobbs Ferry: Morgan and Morgan, 1976. Reves. Text by Michel Tournier. Brussels: Complexe, 1979. Talisman. Edited by Marco Livingstone. Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, 1986. The Teapot Opera. Photographs and text by Arthur Tress. Goro International, 1986, Abbeville, 1988. Male of the Species: Four Decades of Photography by Arthur Tress. Text by Michale Tournier. Fotofactory, 1999. Fish Tank Sonata. Bulfinch, 2000. Arthur Tress: Fantastic Voyage: Photographs 1956-2000. Bulfinch, 2001. Memories. Photographs by Arthur Tress, Poems by Guillaume Apollinaire. 21st,
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