editorial


This exhibition of photographs created by Arthur Tress between 1960 and
1980 looks back at a momentous time in the history of the medium. During that
time the dominant paradigm of photography began to shift from the »modern«
to the »postmodern«.

The »modern« paradigm of photography foregrounded the verisimilitude of the
photographic image, its seeemingly »objective« recording of the visible world.
The »postmodern« paradigm stresses the opposite, that is the ultimately con-
trived, fictitious nature of those recordings.

The practice derived from the »modern« paradigm has been called »straight«
photography. From the »postmodern« paradigm several practices have been
derived, most notably the practice of »staged« photography.

That term was coined only after 1980, when »staged« photography had be-
come established as the core practice of »postmodern« camera art. Before
1980 the phenomenon was known as the »directorial mode«. To my know-
ledge it was the photo critic A. D. Coleman, who first used that term defining
it as follows:

This mode might most simply be defined as the deliberate staging
of events for the express purpose of making photographs thereof -
as distinguished from addressing oneself through the camera to
an ongoing, uncontrolled, external 'reality.'

Though you wouldn't know it from studying any of the available
histories of the medium, the directorial mode of photography has
a long, diverse, and honorable tradition. Yet for reasons which
appear to have more to do with photo-historical politics than with
scholarship and logic, certain uses (and users) of the directorial
mode have been accepted as legitimate while others have been
rejected out of hand. The basis for these usually arbitrary judge-
ments generally boils down to the conservative taste patterns of
the medium's heretofore dominant historians.

Thus it has been considered aesthetically permissible for the late
Paul Strand to 'cast' his book on an Italian village, Un Paese, by
having the townspeople lined up and selecting from them those
he considered most picturesque - but unacceptable for Edward
Curtis to persuade American Indians to reenact rituals and events
out of their past; valid for Edward Weston to arrange vegetables
and nudes in static, preconceived configurations in his studio -
but not for William Mortensen to use his studio as the setting for
those mini-dramas which were the basis of his stylized, Symbo-
list allegories.

This quote comes from a piece A. D. Coleman wrote for inclusion in the »Theater
of the Mind« monograph by Arthur Tress, published in 1976 by Morgan & Morgan.
That same year Coleman had another piece in the September issue of »Artforum«
magazine entitled »The Directorial Mode: Notes Toward a Definition«.

In retrospect we can thus pin down 1976 as the year when the public discourse
about »staged« photography as a new, but already viable practice of camera art
set in, viable, because Coleman could mention several artists pursuing it:

A list of the most influential and prolific contemporary workers in
this form would have to indude Leslie Krims, Ralph Eugene Meat-
yard, Richard Kirstel, Lucas Samaras, Clarence John Laughlin,
Duane Michals, Eikoh Hosoe and Arthur Tress.

By 1976 Tress had published four monographs: »Open Space in the Inner City«,
1971; »The Dream Collector«, 1972; »Shadow«, 1975; and »Theater of the Mind«,
1976. The last three of those contain only images which were done in »the direc-
torial mode«. Not so the first. Here, in »Open Space in the Inner City«, we see
Tress moving from the »straight« to the »directorial« or »staged« mode of photo-
graphy in the years 1965 to 1970.

As Coleman points out in the passage quoted above, »the directorial mode« already
had a tradition of its own (with a strong affinity to surreal imagery) when adopted
by artists like Arthur Tress. But it had always been a marginal tradition compared to
the »straight« mode, and little known, therefore.

Thus, when artists like Arthur Tress, Duane Michals and Les Krims adopted the
»directorial« mode during the second part of the 1960s, the move had little critical
impact. As we have seen, it took almost ten years before A. D. Coleman felt the
need in 1976 to introduce a new term to focus attention on the fact that staging
photographs had become a vital practice in the shadow of the still dominant tradi-
tion of »straight« photography.

Why and how staging photographs replaced »straight« photography as the domi-
nant mode of camera art after 1980 is another story, which I do not want to pursue
here further. It is important to keep in mind, however, when trying to gauge the hi-
storic importance of the early work of Arthur Tress we present here.

From today's perspective we can safely say already, that the images featured in
this online exhibition deserve a place in the »Hall of Fame« of the Fotorama, be-
cause they helped to revitalize the practice of the »directorial« mode in camera art
and thus (along with the early work of Duane Michals, Les Krims and other camera
artists in the United States) initiated a development which lead to the end of »mo-
dern« photography after 1980 and its replacement by »postmodern« practices as
dominant modes of camera based art, which foreground the artifi- cial nature of
the camera image by staging, appropriating and manipulating it in every fashion
imaginable.


2.

In selecting the images for our online version of »Theater of the Mind« we took the
sequence of plates in the recent Tress monograph »Fantastic Voyage: Photographs
1956-2000« as model. Which means that the images we present follow upon one
another in their chronological order (more or less) and a grouped according the
three books by Arthur Tress in which they were originally published: »Open Space
in the Inner City«, 1971; »The Dream Collector«, 1972; and »Theater of the Mind«,
1976. Since we chose »Theater of the Mind« as the main title of this online show,
the images from the book »Theater of the Mind« appear here under the headline
»Directors of Darkness«, a phrase Tress used as a chapter heading in the book
version of »Theater of the Mind«.


3.

All material presented in this online show is copyrighted. It may not be
downloaded, copied, distributed, or used in any other manner, unless
prior written consent to do so has been obtained from the respective
copyright holder. If a party is interested in obtaining such a written con-
sent, we are happy to help. Just email us under the following address:

fotorama@t-online.de


4.

We finally wish to thank Arthur Tress for his generous support while preparing this
online presentation of his work.

- Michael Köhler, August 2002