Discoveries in street photography aren’t always what they are hyped up to be, but Arthur Tress‘s rediscovery of some of his early work holds more promise than most. Tress took around 900 photos during a short stay in San Francisco in the summer of 1964, and stored the prints that be made from them in a community darkroom there wrapped up in a parcel at his sister’s house when he went off to work elsewhere.
Forty-five years later in 2009 he came across them again and decided they were interesting, and took them to show curator James Ganz at the de Young Museum.
The show Arthur Tress: San Francisco 1964 opened there on 3 March and runs until 3 June 2012, and there is just a little more information in the press release. If you – like me – can’t get to San Francisco, the best place to see them is on Tress’s own web site. Of course his later and better known work is also worth a long look. Accompanying the show is a book of the same title, and also worth reading is an interview with him by Jim Kasson from 2002 on the web site of The Center for Photographic Art in Carmel. Although I wrote about Tress’s work on several occasions on another site I’m surprised to find that this seems to be his first mention here on >Re:PHOTO.