Tress, Arthur

Born in Brooklyn in 1940, Arthur Tress began to photograph Circus acts and dilapidated buildings around Coney Island when he was 12. Arthur Tress gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York and later moved to Paris to attend film school in 1962. After five years of world travel to Asia and Africa, Tress developed an interest in ethnographical photography that led to him becoming a government photographer, recording endangered folk cultures in Appalachia. Tress used his photography to raise awareness of the economic and human costs of environmental pollution. From the early 1980s, Tress began shooting in colour. In 2002 he explored more formalist themes in his photography, in the style of mid-century modernism; combining a spontaneous shooting style with a constructivist’s sense of architectural composition and abstract shape. Tress currently resides in Cambria, California.