Holden Luntz Gallery

Arthur Tress: Flood Dream

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.