ARTHUR TRESS

Arthur Tress was born in Brooklyn in 1940 and, since he was young, he started experimenting with the camera in Cony Island. He’s well known for a socalled “magic realism” photography in which both everyday-life elements and the ones taken from the imaginary are melted together as a trademark of his production.  

This particular approach has been especially selected for the series “Dream Collector”, a real cornerstone of his career according to which he was able to create an authentic, strong and shocking portrait of the emotional effect on the viewer. After having recorded the dreams of a group of children, he made them listening again to such memories asking them to re-experience those events, to photograph them. It deals often with surrealistic backgrounds that reveal fears, wishes and the metaphorical imaginary of the little ones. 

His aim was to go beyond the simple documentation of facts, to create works able to instill an ambiguous portrait of reality through the addition of concrete elements with a metaphysical connotation. Such choice disorientates the viewer and introduces him in a dream-like atmosphere, following a strategy used also for later works.

“The photographic image has great possibilities. The magical photograph attempts to go beyond the immediate context of the recorded experience into the realm of the indefinable. The photographer as magician is acutely aware of the multiplicity of the association submerged in the appearance of the objective world”.