Appendix C identifies the political cartoons in Tress’ collection. Appendix B describes props used by Tress, organized by photographic project. Appendix A contains an inventory of books and publications donated to the CCP by Arthur Tress, including materials which have been annotated by Tress. There are three appendices: Appendix A, Arthur Tress Personal Library Appendix B, Props Inventory by Title of Work and Appendix C, Tress Political Cartoon Collection. Series 2, Activity files, contains various materials related to the life and career of Tress, including correspondence, books, exhibition materials, audiovisual materials, publication materials, Tress’ personal library, a collection of political cartoons, and posters.

Series 1, Props, contains photography props used in various projects by Tress, including “Fish Tank Sonata” and “Tea Pot Opera.” 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).The Arthur Tress collection comprises two series and contains materials that include props, correspondence, publication material, exhibition material, and audiovisual material. 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.

Arthur tress the dream collector