ARTHUR TRESS was born in 1940 in New York City and began his first camera work as a teenager in the rather surreal neighborhood of Coney Island. Tress is best known for photographing in a mode of magic realism, combining elements of actual life with staged fantasy that became his hallmark style of directorial fabrication. This approach was shown in his early books, Dream Collector, Shadow, Theater of the Mind, and a recent collection of homoerotic fantasy, Male of the Species. In the mid 1980s Tress began making a series of color still lives that were later published as Tea Pot Opera, Fish Tank Sonata, and Requiem for a Paperweight.

Tress's many exhibitions range from Appalachia People and Places, his first one-man show in 1967 at the Smithsonian Institute, to Fantastic Voyage, his recent fifty-year retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. He has received grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is in the many museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.