statement on the artist


Richard Lorenz
Fantastic Voyage :
The Photographs of Arthur Tress

PROLOGUE

»Photography is my method for defining the confusing world
that rushes constantly toward me. lt is my defensive attempt
to reduce our daily chaos to a set of understandable images.
Through my camera I try to clarify and edit the innumerable
flow of momerts that constantly parades and irvades my
senses. My urge to photograph is activated by an almost
biological instinct for self-preservation from disorder. The
camera is a mechanical apparatus that extends my natural
ability and desire for meaningful organization. I need it to sur-
vive.« - Arthur Tress [1]

Arthur Tress distills multiple viewpoints in his unique and ever-evolving style of
photography. The cultural and historical inquiry of the ethnographer, the psycho-
social guidance and thought-seeding of the stage director, and the calculating,
sometimes improvisational, imagination and creativity of the artist all coalesce in
Tress the photographer. He is one of America's most prodigious and diversified
photographers, one whose documentary reportage can be so subjective or fa-
bricated that it subverts the genre, whose manufacture of visual eros can pre-
sent seemingly incongruous dualities of beauty and violence, and whose cre-
ation of an individual mythology in a universe of kitsch can make sense of the
meaning of life, death, and the hereafter.

Tress speculates that »much of today's photography . . . fails to touch upon the
hidden life of the imagination and fantasy which is hungry for stimulation. The
documentary photographer supplies us with facts or drowns in humanity, while
the pictorialist, avant-garde or conservative, pleases us with mere aesthetically
correct compositions - but where are the photographs we car pray to, that will
make us well again, or scare the hell out of us?« [2] Over a span of thirty-five
years, Tress has created his own selective world to suggest an answer to his
query, a compellingly neo-surrealistic spectrum of imagery. He delights in the
thought of leading his viewers through it for one fantastic voyage. .



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