Arthur Tress

While living in France, he traveled to Japan, Africa, Mexico, and throughout Europe. He observed many secluded tribes and cultures and was fascinated by the roles played by the shaman of the different groups of people. The cultures to which he was introduced would play a role in his later work. Tress spent the spring and summer of 1964 in San Francisco, documenting the 1964 Republican National Convention that nominated Barry Goldwater, civil rights demonstrations at segregated car dealerships on Van Ness Avenue, and The Beatles' 1964 world tour. Tress took over 900 photographs that were later shelved until 2009 when he rediscovered a stack of vintage prints while organising his sister's estate after her death. The work was subsequently exhibited at San Francisco's de Young Museum.

Tress attended Abraham Lincoln High School in Coney Island. He studied painting at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1962. After graduation he moved to Paris to attend film school, but soon dropped out.

In the late 1960s, he made a series of surreal photographs about children's dreams, using staged scenarios.

Tress comes from a Jewish background; his parents immigrated from Europe. He was born in Brooklyn, New York. The youngest of four children in a divorced family, he spent time in his early life with both his father, who remarried and lived in an upper-class neighborhood, and his mother, who remained single after the divorce. His sister was the lawyer and gay rights advocate Madeleine Tress. At age 12, he began to photograph circus freaks and dilapidated buildings around Coney Island in New York City, where he grew up. He has said that "growing up as a gay man in the 1950s was not easy, especially at school."

Arthur Tress (born November 24, 1940) is an American photographer. He is known for his staged surrealism and exposition of the human body.