Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice older book in good condition. Pages in good condition. No notes or highlighting. Some very light marking due to age. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Arthur Tress thinks of himself as a kind of shaman seeking through his photographs to engender a ritualistic sense of delirium. His intention is to create ‘an evocation of the sacred by magical means’ hence his choice of the title Talisman for this collec- tion of his work. His photographs range from the witty and theatrical to the desolate disconcerting and shocking. In 150 duotone and 22 full-colour reproductions Talisman is a retrospective of Tress’s photographic vision. It begins with photographs of New York City (1967-70) and goes on to his pictures of people by turns mysterious surrealistic grotesque and erotic which won him his first acclaim. Included are re- enactments of children’s dreams intense portraits of adults and their relationships and a group of highly charged male nudes of the late 1970s. Separate sec- tions are devoted to his two major sequences Sha- daw (1974) and The Teapot Opera (1979). The book closes with his Hospital Series of the 1980s colour photographs of sculptural inventions which make use of the abandoned artifacts of our technological society. The images in this monograph which is pub- lished on the occasion of a major retrospective ex- hibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art Oxford strike the reader with unnerving force: they are beguiling seductive and disturbing. (SP)