Arthur Tress: Fantastic Voyage : Photographs 1956-2000 [Hardcover]

John Wood (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 25, 2001

Arthur Tress's career can be seen as a long fantastic voyage - from early photojournalism into the realm of surrealism, eroticism and minature worlds. This retrospective is an overview of Tress's career. As the title implies, Tress's work is full of fantasy - nothing is what it at first seems. His images contain dark undercurrents and light wit, violence and beauty, futuristic scenes and homoerotic and psychologically charged tableaux. The 250 images featured in this volume range from the early black-and-white work to the richly coloured surrealistic images of the 1990s and his latest, previously unpublished work in progress. Richard Lorenz, (curator of a retrospective exhibition in Washington, DC, in May 2001) offers an in-depth biographical essay on Tress and the development of his vision. An essay by noted photo critic John August Wood puts Tress in context.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Photography was surrealist before surrealism was invented. "Mistakes" in composition, exposure, and development produced results contrary to what had been intended but which were captivatingly fanciful and dreamlike, and soon odd images were being planned. Tress started out as an ethnographic documentarian but, partly inspired by the rituals he recorded, turned to ever more premeditated subjects. In an early project, he asked New York children to tell him their dreams and then posed them, with appropriate trappings, in neighborhood spaces to illustrate their sleeping fancies. His projects since the mid-1980s involve arrangements of tools, toys, furniture, dolls, and other stuff that Tress paints and lights to suggest scenarios and even narratives. Besides the short-term projects, Tress has made surrealist outdoor still lifes and male nudes over longer periods. The latter, including some of his best-known pictures, are implicitly homoerotic but considerably more apprehensive and even dread-filled than the nudes of fellow gay surrealist Duane Michals. But there is more humor and less darkness in Tress' highly polished work than the commentators here acknowledge. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author

Richard Lorenz is the author of multiple volumes on photographer Imogen Cunningham and the catalogue for a travelling show of Tress' work that toured between 1994 and 1999.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Bulfinch (May 25, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0821226002
• ISBN-13: 978-0821226001
• Product Dimensions: 11 x 9.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #430,090 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Emphasizes Tress' singular language of surrealism, August 10, 2001

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Arthur Tress: Fantastic Voyage : Photographs 1956-2000 (Hardcover)

Arthur Tress: Fantastic Voyage, Photographs 1956-2000 arose from the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.) retrospective exhibition dedicated to this influential American photographer. Richard Lorenz's informative commentary is augmented by a contribution from John Wood on the life and work of Tress. Organized as a kind of autobiography emphasizing Tress' singular language of surrealism, humor and psychosocial commentary as expressed with an artist's eye through the medium of a camera's lens, this seminal work will introduce a master photographer to a whole new generation of appreciative students and photographer buffs.

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars arthur tress: fantastic voyages, December 2, 2001

By 

Johnny Goodwin (Oak Grove, alabama United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Arthur Tress: Fantastic Voyage : Photographs 1956-2000 (Hardcover)

This book is a great overall of Tress' work, covering his early workes to his present ones. As an art photo teacher, its a great resource to have to show examples for assignments such as dream, light and dark, series, and shadow.
The images are wonderfully reproduced and there is a great essay describing Tress and his vision. Each section of Tress' work also has an introduction by him.