Richard Lorenz : Fantastic Voyage [3]



Tress enrolled at Bard College, a small, radical liberal arts college on the Hud-
son River north of New York City. The school had few classes or exams;
studies were completely self-directed through tutorials. He became deeply
influenced by Heinrich Bluecher, Hannah Arendt's husband, with whom he
studied comparative world culture and philosophy. Bard owned several large
Hudson River estates, which were used to house students, and Tress moved
into an abandoned greenhouse on one of the properties. During his years at
Bard, he painted landscapes in the style of Cezanne and he photographed,
beginning a recurring use of optical translucency by shooting patterns of
leaves and objects against the grid of the greenhouse skylights. The later
photograpby of Alfred Stieglitz (largely executed around Lake George, New
York) interested Tress during these years, and he briefly experimented with
photographic homages to the master in a number of composed, artistic na-
ture studies of trees and grasses.

By 1961 Tress temporarily resumed using a 35mm camera to work within
a photojournalistic style (fig. 5) inspired by the growing influence of photo-
graphers like Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, and Garry
Winogrand. Tress appreciated their imagery as »isolated fragments of life
exhibiting an existential alienation,« and considered the work »a new kind
of social journalism not specifically a narrative story, a little like the early
Cartier-Bresson.« A growing interest, too, in film, especially the work of
Sergei Eisenstein and his unfinished masterpiece »Que Viva Mexico!«,
made Tress consider the use of montage, the physical layering of imagery
to create an emotional effect and a story. In his own work, he incorporated
a sort of internal montage by employing diverse visual elements within the
picture frame.

Hoping to support himself as a professional photographer, Tress decided
to try fllmmaking. He bought a hand-crank Bolex motion-picture camera and
made several thirty-minute films. One of his short features, »Inner Texture«,
was soon being screened at tbe Avenue B Theatre, a lower East Side movie
house for experimental film run by the prominent undergraund filmmakers
Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakage. »Inner Texture« depicted a woman scantily
clad in a negligee, »alone, abandoned, and sexually aching,« dancing in a
room, spinning deliriously and gradually suffering a nervous breakdown.
Shot from odd camera angles, scenes of the dancer were spliced among
textural footage of New York City and overlaid with a rapid, frantic sound-
track. Another early film, »Daymares«, is a series of faces in reveries, mon-
taged with pulsating, hallucinatory images of light abstractions, newspaper
headlines, and New York cityscapes, all tied together by a throbbing, mini-
malist score.

After graduating from Bard in 1962, Tress moved to Paris ta study at the
Institute des Hautes Etudes Cinematographique. Soon disenchanted with
the school, he gave up fllmmaking and moved on to Barcelona. lt became
the first stop on a world tour, financed by bis father, that over the next
several years would take hirn through Europe, Egypt, Mexico, India, Japan,
and Africa. During these travels, his photography shifted toward ethno-
grapbic documentation of the cultures, festivals, and ceremonies of his
ports of call.

During half of 1964 Tress lingered in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, to
photograph native rituals such as penitents who flagellated themselves
with cacti. Jaunts through Mexica City produced such odd studies as
Tress's self-portrait reflected within a window display of dental para-
phernalia (fig. 6), a curious girl whose hair ribbons echo the butterflies
displayed in natural history museum cases behind her (fig. 7), and the
immortal, gesturing hands of a human mummy encased in glass (Pl. 8).
During tbe following year Tress carried out an extended series on the
spring rain ceremony of the Tenehapa Indians, descendents of the
Mayans. A masked shaman, threatening all observers with stuffed
rodents carried around his neck, accompanies a procession af holy
men who bless homes while a character dressed as a bull dances.
The shaman represents the dark powers af the underworld but dually
acts as court jester, mimicking the ceremonies with obscene gestures.
The inherent symbolism in Tress's portrait of the shaman (fig. 8) reveals
the photographer's attitude toward metaphor and dark undertones. Re-
lating to Jorge Luis Borges's term »sagrada horror« (holy dread), Tress
admits that »guilt and fear of retribution of the unhappy spirits may be
part of my psychological process,« and that his photography allows
for the »exorcism of hostility« on the path to spiritual enlightenment. [6]

Tress's continual world travels and the assorted courses he took while
on the road kept him from being drafted during the Vietnam War. All the
while, he was building a considerable inventory of stock photographs
for potential commercial sales. While in Japan in 1964, he pbotagraphed
one of the few remaining edifices left after the bombing of Hiroshima.
A plea for pacifism, the image captures the evocative environment un-
der dim, haunting night lighting (fig. 9). Although alienated from America,
Tress occasionally returned to the States. In 1966 he photographed a
misanthropic impression of mundane office workers, the cags in the
wheel who questioned neither authority nor the hawkish bureaucracy
of the times (Pl. 14). Reflected in rain puddles as they scurry home,
they become grotesque, underworld caricatures.

In 1967 Tress moved to Sweden, where he prepared educational film-
strips for the Stockholm Ethnographical Museum. While in Stockholm
Tress began to pursue in earnest a distinct directorial style of docu-
mentation, employing candid situations altered to suit his particular
and intuitive imagination. His Mexican photographs had suggested a
certain improvisational staging, but now he more consciously directed
tableaux vivants for his camera. His experiences with primitive cul-
tures helped to define his new desire to study »myths and rituals, to
find the primitive 'shades of darkness' in our own modern life with its
ceremonies of violence and sex.« [7] The Stockholm pictures form an
introduction to Tress's mature theatrical images. For example, the am-
biguous »Women in Pet Cemetery« (fig. 10) presents a surreal, suspi-
cious drama of disquietude and grief only explicated by the title. The
guise of objectivity obfuscates Tress's staged manipulation of the
scene.

The Ethnographical Museum commissioned Tress to document the
cultures of several African tribes in Gambia, Mali, Niger, and Daho-
mey. He produced photographic series on African music, circum-
cision ceremonies, craft industries, the daily life of the Dogon and
Somba tribes, and the salt caravans that crossed the Sahara. But
be became seriously ill with hepatitis during his African travels and
in 1968 returned to New York City to recover. lt was then that he
finally and decisively acknowledged his commitment to a photogra-
phic profession.


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