ARTHUR TRESS Lives in Cambria, CA. Has captured metaphors in the ...

TRESS

Lives in Cambria, CA. Has captured metaphors in the frozen frame for 45 years. Broke away from street photography of the 70s and mastered a type of "directorial," or staged, photography. Reintroducing two older series because he feels the sense of anxiety that pervades our time can be found in these photos.

What are your beginnings in photography? My childhood in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. Even though it was in its heyday, the neighborhood behind Coney Island was in decay. So it was fascinating for me to wander through this very surreal landscape after school.

Describe your relationship to your art? It's a very sensitive instrument for expressing my inner states of feeling. But I don't do it by photographing myself; I find outside metaphors to express those feelings.

Your photos come across as hauntingly beautiful. What attracts you to the darkness that fills most of your work? Perhaps it was my own dark and disturbed childhood, having divorced parents, being gay growing up in the 50s, alienated and lonely. But I also believe in the mystery of things. I had been to Egypt, where you enter these old tombs and there's this wonderful and mysterious feeling of sacred precinct. So when I was building these installations [for the "Hospital Series"] in these very gloomy spaces, they look like artifacts from an ancient civilization of another planet. I was like an archeologist uncovering these remains from a lost world.

What's most interesting about the medium? What makes the image interesting is that it's transformative. It's a way of seeing the fragment that's been transposed to a different level of experience. It's like a psychedelic or shamanistic experience. I call it the "boing" effect. Like Tom and Jerry would hit each other over the head with a frying pan, but it's like your head is just knocked into another realm. And then you're able to freeze a little fragment of that parallel reality.

Where does the first seed of a series come from? Just going out and seeing things. I give myself a couple of months to toy with ideas. Most of them are dead ends, but I see where they take me. It takes a certain amount of courage to give yourself the freedom to do that, to go into little areas you haven't explored before. I compare it to the way a kid will pick up an object and play with it, turn it around 12 times and bang it—even chimpanzees do it; it's a way of exploring something.

"Dream Collector" is exhibited at ClampArt in Chelsea; The "Hospital Series" is exhibited at the Hunter/ Fox Fine Gallery. See the Listings section for further info.