Arthur Tress 1975

This is Mike Mandel’s photograph of Arthur Tress. The black and white image is of a man, maybe in his late teens, wearing sun glasses, a jacket, and baseball mitt, with the words “Arthur Tress” above his head. It’s like the title of a book, or a movie. The American flag is waving in the background, slightly out of focus, like a hallucination. I think about the process of constructing images, the choices the artist makes to create something which is both of a specific time and place, and also deeply strange. Why Arthur Tress? Why the baseball mitt? Mandel, like many other artists, is creating his own language and using photographs to ask questions about identity, representation, and the nature of reality. Artists are in an ongoing conversation and exchange of ideas across time, inspiring one another’s creativity and inviting us to contemplate the ambiguities of life.