A Magical Realist
Arthur Tress is a photographer of paradoxes—documentarian and dream-weaver, realist and surrealist, a visionary who has spent his career tracing the shifting boundaries between the seen and the unseen. Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1940, Tress began taking photographs as a teenager in Coney Island, where the decaying spectacle of amusement parks and seaside crowds formed the backdrop to his earliest fascination with the uncanny and the theatrical. His artistic trajectory would take him far from straightforward reportage into a uniquely stylized world of allegorical tableaux, ritual imagery, and psychological fantasy—what he later came to call magic realism.
“When I was in high school, you could see a lot of surrealist paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was a lot of bombed out buildings and desolated wastelands of WWII. It illustrated a style that I was excited to work with in my photography.”
Opening Portals into the Unconscious
This early exposure to surrealist painting left a lasting imprint on Tress, whose images channel a dreamlike intensity—rich with psychological symbolism, mystery, and theatricality. Rather than documenting the visible world, his work opens portals into the unconscious, revealing inner landscapes shaped by fantasy, myth, and emotion. While many of his contemporaries were immersed in the gritty immediacy of street photography—a dominant visual style in the 1960s and ’70s—Tress pushed toward the inner life, the symbolic, and the dreamlike. “Photographers incorporating fantasy,” he recalled, “were brushed off as paltry eccentrics.” Yet it was precisely through fantasy that Tress found a profound language for what photography could express beyond documentation.
The Dream Collector
Perhaps Tress’s most iconic body of work is The Dream Collector, a series created in the early 1970s that features children acting out their dreams and nightmares. Tress interviewed children about their inner lives, their dreams and nightmares, then collaborated with them to stage surreal, often haunting scenes that brought those unconscious visions into the real world. The resulting photographs are eerie, poetic, and psychologically dense—imbued with archetypal symbolism and a distinctly Jungian sense of the collective unconscious.
“It may seem strange,” he wrote, “but I just have this strong conviction that children might be able to see certain things in the presence of certain things. Things that adults are no longer aware of. Children have a way of listening to ‘muses,’ they’re aware of them, because they haven’t been educated out of it. They haven’t closed their minds to the possibility. And I feel that if the photographer is very sensitive, he can do this too. He can hear the vibrations of the invisible.”
In these images, children become oracles—mediums who channel the invisible through gesture, posture, and imaginative play. The photographs feel both staged and spontaneous, real and surreal. They are not merely portraits; they are emotional excavations.
Flood Dream, Ocean City, NJ
Among the most memorable images from The Dream Collector is the photograph titled Flood Dream, Ocean City, NJ. It depicts a boy clinging to the roof of a dilapidated home that has washed ashore. The sea has seemingly receded, leaving the structure stranded on a barren, watery plain, while a distant ship looms on the horizon. The boy’s posture—arms gripping the shingles, eyes fixed to the camera—conveys a potent blend of tension, vulnerability, and anticipation. The desolate landscape, devoid of context or other human presence, evokes what The Met calls “a non-place characteristic of dreams,” intensifying feelings of desperation, loneliness and abandonement.
Formally, Tress composes with surreal precision. The roof diagonals pull the viewer inward, while the horizon line and ship anchor the composition in a haunting stillness. This interplay of narrative and abstraction places the image firmly within magic realism—an ordinary element (a boy on a roof) infused with strange, dreamlike gravity. This photograph stands as a hallmark of Tress’s transition from documentary to constructed, surreal narratives—ushering in an era where photographers embraced staging and fantasy. “Tress’s early work from his Dream Collector and other related series constitutes a remarkable artistic achievement and a major contribution to the history of post-war photography and the photo book,” said Timothy Potts, Maria Hummer-Tuttle and Robert Tuttle Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “In a series of increasingly radical projects, Tress delved deeply into the worlds of surrealism and the unconscious, establishing himself as one of the most interesting mavericks of his generation.”
Carving Out a Space for Visionary Storytelling
Arthur Tress’s influence can be felt across a broad spectrum of contemporary photography—from conceptual portraiture to staged narrative work. He gave photography permission to be strange, mythic, poetic, and deeply personal. In an era increasingly dominated by realism and documentation, Tress carved out a space for visionary storytelling—one that continues to inspire photographers, artists, and dreamers alike. He has published numerous books and has exhibited widely. Key publications include The Dream Collector (1972), Shadow: A Novel in Photographs (1975), The Theater of the Mind (1976), Facing Up (1980), and Male of the Species (1992). His photographs have been collected by major institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Solo exhibitions of his work have appeared at the International Center of Photography in New York, the George Eastman Museum, and many other prominent galleries around the world.
By Tuana Pulak – June 2025