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Photographer Arthur Tress took a different approach to photography 40 years ago, when he embarked on his series “Daymares.” For the series, Tress asked friends and children to describe some dreams that either terrified or mystified them. Tress then got to work recreating the nightmarish images and photographing them. At the time, during the 60s and 70s, the work was groundbreaking. Photographers were expected to simply record life at the time. Tress broke the mold by staging his photographs and creating art, albeit of the horror genre.
Inspiration for Series
The series was inspired by child educator Richard Lewis. Lewis had asked Tress to come to his classroom and photograph students writing poems and doing painting that expressed dreams the kids had. Tress was excited by the idea, and afterward set to work creating real-life versions of the nightmarish images. The theme carried on with Tress, and continued to appear in his work throughout the next 20 years. Tress explains “The purpose of these dream photographs is to show how the child’s creative imagination is constantly transforming his existence into magical symbols for unexpressed states of feeling or being. In fact, we are all always interchanging or translating our daily perceptions of reality into the enchanted sphere of the dream world.”
The series certainly inspires fear and discomfort, much more than most adult nightmares of appearing naked in a board room or being confronted by crushing debt. In one, a terrifying face emerges from the top of a devastated armchair. In another, a young girl is chased by a huge dinosaur. Children also transform into objects or are buried in sand throughout the series. While not all of the images depict out-and-out rational fears, all of the black and white images portray a sense of unease that is easy to understand when viewing the photographs.
