Born in Brooklyn, New York, Arthur Tress began his first camera work as a teenager in the surreal neighborhood of Coney Island where he spent hours exploring the decaying amusement parks. Later, during five years of world travel, mostly in Asia and Africa, he developed an interest in ethnographical photography that eventually led him to his first professional assignment as a U.S. government photographer recording the endangered folk cultures of Appalachia.

Seeing the destructive results of corporate resource extraction, Tress began to use his camera to raise environmental awareness about the economic and human costs of pollution. Focusing on New York City, he began to photograph the neglected fringes of the urban waterfront with a straight documentary approach. This gradually evolved into a more personal mode of “magic realism” combining improvised elements of actual life with stage fantasy that became his hallmark style of directorial fabrication.  In the late 1960s Tress was inspired to do a series based upon children’s dreams that combined his interests in ritual ceremony, Jungian archetypes, and social allegory. Later bodies of work evolved from this theatrical approach.

Tress began shooting in color in the early 1980s.  Fascinated by medical equipment in an abandoned hospital, Tress created and photographed room-sized painted sculptural installations.  This led to smaller-scale explorations of narrative still life within a children’s toy theater, then within a portable nineteenth-century aquarium.

Tress moved to Cambria in 1992, where he lived for 25 years.  Once there he completed a series exploring inner spaces of the mind, for which Tress created backlit, hyperreal dioramas containing transparencies, glass and objects, then photographed them.  Tress then returned to black-and-white photography, with a dozen series to date, including a few diamond-formatted ones.

In 2023, the Getty Center in Los Angeles presented Rambles, Dreams and Shadows, the first major exhibition to chronicle the early career of Tress.  During the exhibition, the Getty Center hosted the world premiere of the film Arthur Tress: Water’s Edge, an immersive dive into the life, vision and processes of the artist.

Tress comes from a Jewish background; his parents immigrated from Europe.  Tress knew he was gay from a young age.  Tress has said that “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.” 

Tress currently resides in San Francisco.