The majority of photographs in the acquisition represent the states of excitement, fear, and confusion experienced in childhood by placing children in the center of compositions that elicit a destabilized world. Tress began his career in the 1960s creating “straight” street photographs, but soon branched out to explore the realm of the strange and grotesque. Such images laid the groundwork for much of the theatrical, highly constructed work of today’s artists (many of whom acknowledge debt to Tress and his landmark project.Child Buried in Sand, Coney Island, 1968, Arthur Tress. Photographs like those in “Dream Collector” were the first to help negate prejudices against such strict expectations and uses of the medium. While the directorial mode of photography already had a long tradition by the early 1970s, it was documentary work that still vastly dominated critical attention and popular histories.

Tress’s elaborate photographic staging came at a crucial time in the development of the medium. While the body of work was published as the artist’s first major book in 1972, Tress continued to expand the project for several years with many of the strongest and most haunting images appearing beneath the grouping, “Child’s Play,” in his monograph, Theater of the Mind, in 1976.

“I began doing what’s called staged photography-this is around 1970-and that was kind of unusual for the time.” “It was a moment in my own artistic trajectory where I needed to move away from the prevalent documentary realism and street shooting of the late 1960s into new areas of internal self exploration,” Tress told Shutterbug. Many themes were less specific, more fantastic, and a number of the photographs elicit simply a mood, sensation, or recollection. Other dreams included a variety of physical restrictions and claustrophobia, monsters at the bedroom window, and drowning. The collaborations covered divergent nightmares, from falling from a tower, to being buried alive, to the humiliation of failing in the classroom. Interviewing children about their most memorable dreams, Tress attempted to depict the stories for his camera using the same children as his actors. Childhood dreams were what interested American photographer Arthur Tress when, in the late 1960s and ’70s, he created his psychoanalytic “Dream Collector” series of images, which captured children’s nightmares in terrifying detail.

Arthur tress the dream collector