Theater of the Mind (1976)

• Published: Morgan & Morgan, Dobbs Ferry, NY, 1976
• Contributors: Texts by Duane Michals, Michel Tournier and A. D. Coleman
• Edition: First edition
• Pages: Unpaginated (c. 94 pp.); 84 plates
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0-87100-106-3
• Signature: Signed by Tress.
• Condition: Full report on request

Tress at the height of his theatrical manner. Published in 1976, Theater of the Mind casts friends, neighbours and strangers in staged dreams, fears and private rituals, set among the ruins and vacant lots of 1970s New York and its shoreline.

The texts come from three close contemporaries: the photographer Duane Michals, whose own staged sequences explored the same territory; the novelist Michel Tournier; and the critic A. D. Coleman, who that same year named this kind of work "the directorial mode", photographs that are made rather than found. The book is a central document of that tendency in American photography, alongside Tress's earlier The Dream Collector.