Arthur Tress’s best photograph: a boy from the Boston ghetto hides with a gun
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Version 0 of 1. In the late 1960s, an old schoolmate of mine started doing art projects with young kids. In one, they examined their dreams and used them as the inspiration for paintings and poetry. I was invited to photograph the kids and brought along costumes and masks so they could act out their dreams. I decided to pursue the project further and came up with a title: Dream Collector. I made a list of themes from children’s dreams, and asked adult friends what they remembered from theirs. I read a lot of literature and psychology books – Carl Jung wrote a whole book on the subject – then went out to stage some photographs. In 1968, I’d made a series called Open Space in the Inner City, about vacant lots, rooftops and waterfronts being turned into green spaces. It’s something everyone does now, but back then it was new. I decided to shoot in those locations: the desolate spaces had a dreamlike, surreal quality. Children would often be playing in them, so I’d use them as models. I shot this in Boston on a wintry day in 1972. Children are wonderful actors. I would say I was doing a project on dreams and they would immediately understand – because the worlds of reality, illusion and play are close for them. I noticed this TV set dumped in an abandoned lot in Roxbury, on the edge of Boston. At the time, it was quite a rundown, black neighbourhood. There had been riots a couple of years earlier after the death of Martin Luther King and a lot of arson. A kid was running around playing with a toy gun, so I asked him to get inside the TV. There’s a feeling of anxiety and tension, which you get in dreams, but it is also what an urban boy might be feeling. Violence from around the world is brought to us by the media – even more so today with the internet – which makes the photograph still relevant. When you take pictures of children with guns, they’re often aggressive, but this boy posed in a defensive, frightened way. I like having one foot in documentary, the other in more surreal, semi-staged photography. With this, I was making social commentary. I was concerned about economic factors, about the black people who lived in terrible conditions in ghettoes, and how environmental pollution affected children, causing them to have anxieties. The image conjures up the dark mood I was trying to convey. I wasn’t interested in sweet dreams. I come from a Jewish background: my parents migrated in the 1900s and there are strong memories of the Holocaust in our family. My Dream Collector photographs, while being about children, were also about my own world. It was a transformative series for me, enabling my work to become more personal. Growing up as a gay man in the 1950s was not easy, especially at school. Even in the 1960s, there was still a lot of bad feeling, a criminal aspect and a sense of guilt. I think that percolated into my feelings about the alienation of the black community. That’s another reason why this series is important. I was one of the earliest photographers to come out and I can see the start of that process in these photographs. • Arthur Tress’s Transréalités is out in paperback CV Born: Brooklyn, USA, 1940. Studied: Painting at Bard College, New York. Influences: Duane Michals, Georgio de Cherico, Paul Cadmus. High point: “My retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, in 2000.” Top tip: “Keep yourself in a state of perpetual astonishment.” |