Arthur Tress - The Dream Collector

stage pictures       photographic ethos       gained recognition                  

hauntingly beautiful       decisive moment       a golden age

prevalent      internal

Arthur Tress is a master storyteller who first 1________________ with his 2___________________ book of images: The Dream Collector (Richmond, Westover 1972). The book was a challenge to the 3________________ of its time.

The turbulent 1960s and 1970s were 4_______________ for photojournalists who were energized by war and social change. These photographers found their “truths” in soul deadening city streets and jungle front lines. But instead of roaming the streets trying to find a Cartier-Bresson serendipitous 5________________, Tress began to manipulate scenes and 6_______________ to create images that were both real and unreal. 

“It was a moment in my own artistic trajectory where I needed to move away from the 7_____________ documentary realism and street shooting of the late 60's into new areas of 8_______________ self exploration,” Tress says. “I began doing what's called staged photography—this is around 1970—and that was kind of unusual for the time.”

Coney Island of the Mind

Returning to New York       But he was restless        he was conducting                   his home turf           Tress recalls              became my trademark      

the roles of         remarkable offbeat style

Arthur Tress was born in New York in 1940 and, from the age of 12, he took photographs in what is arguably the most surreal place in America: 9____________ of Coney Island. He photographed everything: rundown tenements, empty amusement park rides, and the circus freaks who lived in the neighborhood.

In 1962, he graduated from Bard College with a BFA degree and moved to Paris to attend film school. 10_______________ and ended up travelling for a year in Europe and then Mexico, where he became fascinated by shamans and 11______________ myth and dreams in native cultures.

In 1964 he turned up in San Francisco to document the Republican Convention that nominated Senator Barry Goldwater for president and began to create images in his 12__________________. One of his images from that year was the photograph of a woman with sunglasses seated next to the pay to view telescopes. 

13__________________ he had a show of environmental images at the Sierra Club and ran into a Bard college classmate Richard Lewis who asked him to help with a children’s workshop 14________________.

"Every year he had a different theme, and one year he did children's dreams, to get kids to write poems and paintings from their dreams,” 15______________. “So he called me in to photograph his class. So I said, you know, that's a terrific idea, and I'm going to pursue that by asking children and my friends what dreams they remembered from childhood. I was looking for mythological, archetypical, kind of nightmarish images. That kind of 16_________________ for the next 20 years, that kind of surreal disturbing photography.”

Dreams, Nightmares and Punchlines

 Cloze: try to guess the word...

_____ listening to the children, Tress would take them to locations around the city where they could turn their ideas ___ photographs. The Dream Collector evolved ____ of these pictures.

The images in The Dream Collector are remarkably simple and that makes them ____ disquieting and powerful; the overall effect is ___ being unable to awaken from a nightmare. They grab the viewer with a shocking immediacy _____ there are ___ distractions such as elaborate studio sets, expensive models or sophisticated darkroom tricks.

Essential to the images in The Dream Collector and his subsequent book, Theater of the Mind (Dobbs Ferry: Morgan and Morgan, 1976), is Tress’ knack ___ minimalism and the ___ of incongruous elements to ____ them their dreamlike sensibility. These odd elements are ___ the philosopher Roland Barthes called “punctum” in his final book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Hill and Wang, 1981).

Word Formation: What is the best form of the root word?

Barthes notes that most photographs present a singular straightforward picture and are largely    FORGET    . However, when a photograph contains a punctum, that is, a counterpoint, it becomes        MEMORY     and has deeper meaning. The punctum in a way is the visual equivalent of a good punch line that changes the whole meaning of everything in the joke that came before it. Tress’ images are loaded with punch lines.

It is also said that good photographers are luckier than bad ones and Tress was very lucky indeed.  

“The best memories from creating the dream collector series were always those flashes of sudden     TRANSFORM    , when an ordinary daily scene changed into a magical dream like event...when the everyday happening slides into another realm of awareness,” Tress notes.

Put in the right adjective

famous

gaping

archetypical

abandoned

decrepit

round

strange

“For example the 1______ photo 'Flood Dream' Ocean City, New Jersey, 1970, where the roof of a building was just lying  2_______ on an empty pier. In the far background there was a 3_______ ferryboat hauled onto the dock waiting to be restored. Out of nowhere, a young boy with a 4_____ face and blond hair of about ten came riding by on a small bike. I asked if he would stand beneath the roof where it had a 5_______ hole in it. He was glad to do it and just looked peacefully at the camera. And it was one of those 6_______ moments that moves the ordinary into a special 7_________ space.”

Overdue Recognition

Word formation:

Over the years Tress has earned his    LIVE    selling books of his images and large prints at a gallery near his home in Big Sur. And like Duane Michals, he had for decades been passed over by the art photography world and had few exhibitions of his work in the US.     HAPPY    this changed in 2009 when he was asked to have a show of his photographs at San Francisco’s de Young Museum albeit in one of their side galleries.

“It ran         CURRENT     with a large      BLOCK    exhibition of Jean Paul Gaultier that brought lots of crowds into the museum and some actually drifted into my gallery space,” he recalls. “The gallery was always full of people actually looking at the pictures slowly and discussing them with their friends. They seemed intrigued and stimulated by the strange Tressian combination of the surreal within the       DOCUMENT     .”

Soon     THERE    , the Getty acquired 85 of his vintage prints and Tress felt that this was finally a      VALID     of his work.

“It reinforced my feelings that a lifetime’s devotion to creating a disciplined body of work was a    WORTH    endeavor and, although the    MONEY    rewards have been very small, the sense that I have actually made something wonderful and lasting gave me a great      NEW    pride in myself for having done all this alone and without much help for over 55 years.”

Soon other institutions began to take notice of his work and    ASSESS    his place in the story of photography.

Arthur Tress’ story has a punch line too, a punctum in a way. Since the 1960s he has SHOOT thousands of photographs, created an entire universe of unique and eccentric images, and he did it all with one well-worn Hasselblad and just two old lenses.