Shadow and Synagogue

Arthur Tress

1974

Photograph featuring shadow of a face and a hand over a wall with Hebrew text.
Shadow and Synagogue is one of a series of about one hundred photographs by Tress that appear in his 1975 book, Shadow, A Novel in Photographs. In the book’s visual narrative, the photographer’s shadow becomes the protagonist in a spiritual odyssey. After a variety of experiences in different locations, it finally ascends to a state of illumination. Here the shadow falls on the tablets with the Ten Commandments. Tress credited anthropological studies on the out-of-body trances of shamanistic healers as his inspiration for the project: “These ancient psychic journeys seemed to me similar in their imaginative themes to the subjects of our own private dream voyages. I could act out these transformative travels by using my own particular body to create a dancing mythical shadow figure that would tell the story of just one such trip to the otherworld.”

Credits

Courtesy of the artist.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 10.

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Creator Bio

Arthur Tress

b. 1940

American Arthur Tress is an internationally renowned photographer whose work is found in collections worldwide, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Georges Pompidou, and the International Museum of Photography. Tress is especially known for his black-and-white photographs of New York, his homoerotic images of male nudes, and for the dreamlike atmosphere in many of his photographs. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including Fantastic Voyage, a retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, D.C. (2001).

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