Richard Lorenz : Fantastic Voyage [2]


THE VOYAGE

»The greatest mystery is not that we have been flung
at random between the profusion of the earth and the
galaxy of the stars but that in this prison we can fa-
shion images of ourselves sufficiently powerful to de-
ny our nothingness.« - Andre Malraux [3]


The sense of passage that pervades the imagery of Arthur Tress constantly
reminds us of the transitory nature of life and the imminence of death as part
of human metamorphosis. A simple photographic study by Tress of a toy ship,
abandoned by a careless child and wrecked amid the detritus of a Coney Is-
land waterway (fig. 1), portrays the challenge and peril of any voyage. lt
connotes an archetypal situation as profound as the aftermath of the great
deluge of Genesis. A progression of provocative visual elegies, Tress's pho-
tographs document the risks, both physical and psychological, that coincide
with any journey, any search for knowledge and enlightenment.

An idiosyncratic visual vocabulary arises early in the Tress oeuvre, and his
codes and motifs appear regularly throughout the years in different contexts.
He manipulates light and its alternate - darkness or shadow, water, and op-
tically translucent materials and their refractive quality. He cultivates a recurr-
ing morbid curiosity and fascination with agents of mortality. A 1956 image,
a melange of Greek and slang graffiti-hybridized street hieroglyphics scratch-
ed into a paintedover window (fig. 2) - seems to symbolize the formulation of
a universal language that signifies messages or instructions along the journey.
Another key early picture, of the starlike logo on the glass pane of a notary
public's door (fig. 3), illustrates the frequently dual nature of Tress's work.
Objective photographic representation, shot from nature, ostensibly confirms
a dear and present reality - but not necessarily on all levels. Like a magician
hiding aspects of a trick up his sleeve, the photographer can keep parts of the
image from appearing on the finished print; the photographer steals the image
from its original context, then manipulates it to produce the desired result. The
illustrative use of the notary's window declares that through this very door the
transmission of truth is guaranteed. But Tress insinuates that the truth can be
altered, modified, or transposed to meet the needs of the artist's creative for-
ces. The dark nature so common in Tress finds its origin in his childhood me-
mories and experiences. His family lived in a ground-floor tenement in a lower-
middledass Brooklyn neighborhood. Tress remembers his early view of the
world, filtered through his bedroom window, of a solitary acanthus tree
brooding in the dismal, narrow courtyard outside. His father, Martin, was
in the surplus chemical business and had a passion for accumulating found
objects discarded along New York sidewalks. His mother, Yetta Nerl, pro-
vided what few comforts Martin would financially allow Arthur and his two
older siblings, Madeleine and David. Sweetened by recollections of Rembrandt-
like light and piles of intriguing, dusty books, Tress's memories of his Hasidic
grandparents are alternately overpowered by a sense of gloom-heavy smells,
long beards, and musty synagogues - as well as by the »fanaticism and ec-
stasy« of their religious observance.

A frail, delicate, and dreamy child, Tress did not fit comfortably into the neigh-
borhood. His escape, however, was not too far down the street. During World
War lI, when the Japanese gardens of the Brooklyn botanical gardens were
closed, he would sneak under the fence to find a temporary safe haven.
Another escape was the adjacent Brooklyn Public Library, where Tress
found an early fascination with illustrated books. But his favorite refuge be-
came the Brooklyn Museum, to him »a wonderful, big attic,« where, studying
the Indian and Egyptian collections, he developed a keen interest and love for
art and ethnography.

Tress's parents divorced when he was about nine. Arthur moved with his
mother to Forest Hills, Queens, another rough neighborhood, where they
found an apartment across from the 1939 World's Fair grounds. Tress soon
moved again, back to his father, who, remarried and newly prosperous, now
lived in the wealthy suburb of Sands Point. Taking the old abandoned mansions
in the area as his subject, Tress made his very first photographs, a series of
Kodak snapshots, at the age of twelve, in 1952. When he was fourteen, he
moved back to his mother, who then lived in Brighton Beach, near Coney Is-
land. Tress found his new school, Abraham Lincoln High, to be a progressive,
liberal, primarily Jewish institution with a fine arts department. The nearby
Brighton Beach Cultural Community Center proved to be another supportive
facility for Tress. The center maintained a photographic darkroom, and its
director offered Tress his first lessons in developing and printing. He had
recently received his first 35mm camera, a gift from his brother upon his re-
turn from the Korean War, and Arthur was quick to learn camera and dark-
room techniques. Tress's Coney Island environment - the ghettoization of
the neighborhoods, the burned-out remnants of Luna Park, and the decay
of Steeplechase Park created in hirn a melancholic sense of alienation which
he captured on his earliest rolls of film, images that reflect the acute sense
of abandonment Tress experienced in his essentially dysfunctional family.

When he was sixteen, Tress visited his sister at Georgetown University.
Madeleine had long provided Arthur with intellectual stimulation, and now
she presented him with an important tool to continue his visual explorations -
a 2 1/4-inch Rolleicord camera, which would eventually become his lifelong
format. While in Washington, D.C., Tress investigated and photographed the
textures of its ghettos; he further ventured down to Harpers Ferry, West
Virginia, and made some studies of Appalachian characters.

Back at Abraham Lincoln High School, Tress photographed for the year-
book and newspaper. He shot traditional fare that occasionally transcend-
ed its humble nature, as in an image of the cheerleading squad, whose
hands raised and silhouetted against a dark, hazy sky suggest a curious
ritual in a shadow play (fig. 4). During high school Tress also studied
painting, but his promise as a photographer and his professional direc-
tion were already taking form.

Following a second divorce, Tress's father moved in the late 1950s to Ri-
verside Drive in New York City, and Arthur consequently began to make
more frequent trips into Manhattan. He often visited the Museum of Mo-
dern Art, where he found some of the paintings to be inspirational and
revelatory. He felt a kindred spirit in the metaphysical/surrealist concoc-
tions of Pavel Tchelitchew and especially the magic realist canvases of
Peter Blume, precisely rendered yet contrived by the imagination. Tress's
early photographs of Coney Island's bizarre, dilapidated amusement-park
fantasy world and the pathetic human oddities of the freak show con-
noted a »continual constellation of feeling - a feeling of alienation outside
the norms of society.« [4] These sentiments were reaffirmed by his dis-
covery of the magic realist aesthetic, by which artists working in a rea-
listic technique tried »to make plausible and convincing their improbable,
dreamlike or fantastic visions.« [5].



Following Page

Previous Page