The locations of his “Dream Collector” photos is another crucial layer, given that photographers are often told that location is key to effective storytelling. He found the stretch of New York’s waterfront, for example, as a good location with dreamlike quality. While mostly abandoned and desolate, he found a lot of dreamlike bridges and kids playing in the area. The famous Coney Island amusement park, where he grew up, was another. While already rundown in the 1960s, was still a playground for children and gave way to surreal imagery.
The well-known flood dream photo is a great example of what he was able to create in these dreamlike locations. “I drove down the New Jersey coast in the winter time, and there were a lot of closed down amusement parks because it’s a summer resort. I came to one place where there was a roof just on the ground. And in the background was an old ferryboat. That’s what you can see in the background.
“Then, this little boy came along on his bicycle. So, I asked him to go to the roof on the ground. He just stood there, and I asked him to put his head through the roof. And with the wide-angle lens and the boat, it became kind of very surreal and dreamlike.”
Tress confirmed what we can deduce so far from our talk: improvisation is at the heart of his work. He once wrote beautifully on this topic:
“The contact sheet shows how my work was never a completely predetermined concept but always has a great deal of spontaneous accidental ‘improvisation’ done on the spot at the moment that goes back to my long history as a documentary street photographer.
“It was just these kinds of spontaneous enactments from basically the found circumstances and the accidental visual ‘stuff’ of our urban environment that the pictures were made. Critics have classified these as early ‘staged’ photography, but in reality they were merely thrown together quite quickly out of elements at hand and which although ‘contrived’ this gives them a certain expressive weight — with one foot in documentary reportage and the other in directed theatricality. They are curiously ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ at the same time.”
Expanding surreal storytelling
In a way, “Dream Collector” was a prelude to the many possibilities Tress could take the narrative of staged photography. He followed it up with “Shadow” in 1975, which he described as a book of his own dreams and adventures. It was outstanding in its simplicity, ideation and execution.
In 1976–1977, he switched gears again, delving into the occasional strangeness of domestic dramas for “Theater of the Mind.” “It’s about dealing with adults acting out domestic dramas — parents and children, husbands and wives. The idea is that everyone, inside our head and our relations, we’re all like actors acting out roles,” he explained.
Here, he directs his subjects — which include his own family members — to take part in various imagined scenarios.
However, Tress stopped photographing people in 1980 and turned his lens on objects instead. “Well, I feel that what happens with a lot of photographers and artists and their work, you get into a kind of routine formula. You become desperate and start repeating yourself. And so, the last ones are really never as good as the first ones. I sort of thought I was going to put another child in a trash can, or upside down in their old car. So, I moved on.”
Still, he never lost his affinity for surrealism. From the very first “Still Life” series he did in 1981–1983, all the way to his modernist photography from the 2000s, he was exploring bizarre narratives. His medium of choice, which remains analog to this day, definitely plays a big part in this signature style. However, it’s his criteria for compelling photography takes a bigger role in sustaining his eye for the surreal.
“After the year 2000, I wanted to become a different person. But, it turns out that 20 years later, I’m still making little surreal, strange photos again. So, I think my criteria for compelling photo is that it challenges the mind. It could just be a witty transformation. I think that’s why I like black and white photography, because it transforms things. When I’m photographing some still life, I say, ‘Oh, I’ll do it from all different angles.’ Then I’ll say, ‘Oh, well, now it’s alive.’ So making things alive, and convincing people that it’s artificial, but real at the same time, which is something unique to photography.”
Make sure to check out Arthur Tress’ website to see more of his iconic photography.
All photos by Arthur Tress. Used with permission.
