Richard Lorenz : Fantastic Voyage [4]



VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) magazine hired Tress to photograph
sharecroppers in South Carolina and folk artists and craftspeople in Appalachia.
Although his commission loosely followed the pattern of photodocumentation
begun by the Farm Security Administration photographers and W. Eugene Smith,
Tress instilled his work with his newly found personal vision. In a bleak image
bound together by his subject's provocative stare and a moody haze, Tress
photographed an impoverished barefoot girl holding a kerosene lamp before
a brilliantly lit window (fig. 11), contrasting the grim reality of her existence
with the potential for escape, transformation, and illumination represented by
the glowing curtains.

During 1968 Tress published the first significant collection of bis work in book
form, in Herbert Shellans's »Folk Songs of the Blue Ridge Mountains«. Tress's
iilustrations fulfill a vital role in supporting the text and songs while documenting
the folk mythology passed down among the isolated mountain folk of Appalachian
Virginia. The lyrics of these traditional folk ballads here become a component of
Tress's work. In subsequent years, Tress has frequently included original text,
often verse, as captioning under his imagery.

Foreshadowing Tress's later interest in children and their dreams, »Folk Songs«
included a section on »The Miner's Child's Dream.« Its introduction warned that
when »dreams appear in the traditional songs of the English-speaking world,
they are almost invariably portents of death and adversity.« [8] One song, anti-
cipating disaster, describes a young girl's nightmare. Its final chorus goes:

I dreamed that the mines were all smoking with fire,
And the men all fought for their lives.
Just then the dream cbanged, and the mouth of the mines
Was covered with sweethearts and wives. [9]

Tress's companion image of two sleeping children, entwined in fetal positions,
becomes a preliminary study for the images in his 1972 book, »The Dream
Collector«.

At about this time Tress made other portraits of children in which Diane Arbus's
profound influence on photograpby in New York in the late 1960s is evident
(see fig. 12). Arbus's effect moved Tress into a more confrontational stance
with his subjects, shot on the street and at the beach (pls. 21,22). He pro-
duced poignant images that are condensed and immediate; his characters are
filled with an anxiety about their situations.

The dense, urban environment of New York would present Tress with another
major theme. Funded by the New York State Council on the Arts, he assembled
a massive image bank called »Open Space in the Inner City« (1969-70), which
attempted »to show that the enjoyable quality of urban life has not kept up with
the advances of our modern life.« Tress stated: »We have put a man on the
moon before we have solved the problem of collecting our cities' garbage. Our
metropolitan centers daily grow more impossible to live in as millions of Ameri-
cans congregate about our large urban areas. We have come up with few in-
telligent solutions to the crisis . . . The human spirit and body need open space
in order to be a healthy and vital organism and the vistas of nature if it is to ex-
pand to its fullest and happiest capacity.« [10]

Like Berenice Abbott's influential book »Changing New York« (1939), »Open
Space« juxtaposed remnants of old New York charm with the frequent horrors
and misguided intentions of modernization. It shockingly portrayed ecological
abuse and the pollution of land sites and waterways. Taken as a whole, how-
ever, it becomes Tress's guide to New York as it moves the viewer through
the initiation of urban life, occasionally acted out by subjects who unwittingly
participated in his unique production.

Tress now became increasingly interested in Carl Jung's philosophy of arche-
types. His work, he felt, was changing »from the anecdotal to the universal,«
and he noted that »bridges, gateways, staircases, certain architectural forms
became very mythical for me.« He traversed the city, examining the waterfronts
»where nature and man meet,« as he searched for »transitional, transformative
pieces of architecture« and related them to people. In a 1968 photograph, a boy
crouches in the waters of Long Island Sound, the Whitestone Bridge looming
behind hirn. The skull apparition formed by the youth's reflection in the water
is a startling reminder of mortality and humankind's dark side (pl. 21). The bridge
is an archetypal symbol for transition, a connection between this world and an
afterlife. The skull in the water represents the evil that befalls the person who
cannot successfully cross the bridge, who fails this rite of passage.

»The Dream Collector« (1972), Tress's first major book, resulted from his stu-
dy of dream phenomena and was a natural step in his developing archetypal
imagery. After interviewing children about their most memorable dreams, he
attempted to re-create the imagery for his camera, using tbe children as his
actors and whatever props might be available. The collaborations covered
divergent nightmares, from falling from a tower (fig. 13), to being buried alive
(pl. 28), to the humiliation of failing in the classroom (pl. 37). Other dreams in-
cluded a variety of physical restrictions and claustrophobia, monsters at the
bedroom window, and drowning (pl. 33). Tress stated: »The purpose of
these dream photographs is to show how the child's creative imagination is
constantly transforming his existence into magical symbols for unexpressed
states of feeling or being. In fact, we are always interchanging or translating
our daily perceptions of reality into the enchanted sphere of the dream world.«
[11]

Tress extended his approach to portraiture in a subsequent project and book
he called »Theater of the Mind« (1976). Working with family groups, couples,
and solitary individuals, Tress relied on what he considered psychic intuition
to set up an intriguing emotional dialogue in the pictures. He wrote about his
method: »The photographic frame is no longer being used as a documentary
window into undisturbed private lives, but as a stage on which the subjects
consciously direct themselves to bring forward hidden information that is not
usually displayed on the surface." [14]

Introduced by Duane Michals as a »photographic vaudeville, funny and sad,«
»Theater of the Mind« presented six chapters titled with theatrical metaphors:
Child's Play, Private Acts, Domestic Scenes, Stage Properties, Directors of
Darkness, and Final Curtain. Each is full of bizarre, surreal, or provocative
ideas. The ominous cover photograph of a man with demonic tattoos on his
shaved head (fig. 14) presents tbe book's premise: the self-creation of indi-
vidualized worlds and the acting out of the fantasies they entail. The peculiar
young man in »Herrnaphrodite behind Venus and Mercury«, coyly hiding his
genitals (fig. 15), pretends to be a living sculpture, a hybridized modern
mythological figure. Perhaps Tress's best-known image, »Stephan Brecht,
Bride and Groom« (pl. 50), straddles the idea of psychological tableau most
comfortably. Tress photographed Brecht, an actor with Charles Ludlam's
Ridiculous Theater Company, in costume for his gender-switching role in
»The Grand Tarot.« Brecht's dual nature, his gestures, and the surreal site
(the scorched ruins of a landmark Greenwich Village church) all contribute
to a rich, visual paradox. Androgyny, yin and yang, heaven and earth, the-
ater and reality, resonate throughout the picture.


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