Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows

Review by Gerhard Clausing •

The photographic work of Arthur Tress is highly regarded, even treasured, for a number of reasons. He combines several genres in a unique and personal manner: street photography, portraiture/the depiction of relationships, and environmental observations. With a very special mysterious way of integrating moments, his images often border on or specifically display a very surreal point of view, frequently facilitated by staging some situations. This photobook was published in conjunction with a recent Getty exhibition and focuses on his early work from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s.

Tress started his career doing documentary photography supporting social analysis, such as in Appalachia. That subject also constitutes the first section of both the analysis section and the separate pictorial content section with 132 large plates. This large and comprehensive book is divided into the same six parts in both the descriptive and the pictorial portions:

Appalachia: People and Places
The Ramble
Open Space — The Inner City
The Dream Collector
Shadow
Theater of the Mind

These sections also represent some of the main projects and early publications that Tress produced, and this arrangement allows us to study his progression.

We see an early attention to family relationships, the roles of children, performance observations, and more, as partly shown in the pictures below. The essays by Tress and the Getty expert James A. Ganz, as well as by Mazie M. Harris and Paul Martineau, describe the stages of development, detailing and analyzing many aspects of his life and professional career, along with replicas of some documents and other items from his archives, filling nearly 100 pages. We are also shown a number of contact sheets throughout the book, which give us further insights into the way Tress produces and selects his black and white images. A bibliography and a comprehensive index are also appended.

I particularly appreciate photographs that immerse us in worlds between reality and dreams; they give us something to puzzle over and provide levels of ambiguity that stimulate our own imagination. The picture of the children playing with tops is one such example: we only see a small part of what is going on and need to imagine the rest ourselves. Many of the images are also small mirrors of their time. The first image below, for example, shows Tress in a self-portrait, mirrored in a machine representing an older “selfie” technology then prevalent for spontaneous photographs. Shadows and shapes play a most important role in these dream-like presentations. Some of the images (for those who like to compare) also encourage us to revisit the work of Diane Arbus, Mary Ellen Mark, Arthur Fellig (Weegee), Roger Ballen, Duane Michals, among others, as we trace Tress’s journey into extraordinary realms and “imaginative fiction.”

All in all, this photobook allows readers and viewers multiple leisurely excursions into the fascinating world of Arthur Tress, as we follow him from his own brand of realism all the way to a surrealistic world that stimulates our imagination.

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The PhotoBook Journal previously featured a review of San Francisco 1964 by Arthur Tress.

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Gerhard Clausing, PhotoBook Journal Editor, is an author and artist from Southern California.

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Arthur Tress: Rambles, Dreams, and Shadows

Photographer: Arthur Tress (born in Brooklyn, NY; lives in San Francisco, California)

Editor: James A. Ganz

Essays: Arthur Tress, James A. Ganz, Mazie M. Harris, Paul Martineau, Timothy Potts

Language: English

Design: Kurt Hauser

Hardbound with illustrated cover; 264 pages with 17 color and 198 black and white illustrations; 9.75 x 11.25 inches (25 x 28.5 cm); printed in Italy by Conti Tipocolor; ISBN 978-1-60606-861-8

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Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.