Arthur Tress’s Transréalités gathers work extending from photographs made in the streets of New York and Brooklyn in the 1950s to the dreamlike, theatrical images that became central to his practice. Rather than treating these periods as separate bodies of work, the book presents a sustained reconsideration of how observed life can pass into psychological fiction. Its title names that unsettled territory: a reality transformed, but never entirely abandoned.

The selection gives particular weight to the cinematic character of Tress’s early photographs and to the influence of neorealism. Streets, gestures, and encounters provide the raw material, yet his vision departs from conventional street photography. Across the book, documentary attentiveness increasingly coexists with staging, fantasy, and visual dislocation. The later pictures do not simply replace observation with invention; they expose the imaginative charge already present in ordinary scenes.

Published by Contrejour in 2013, Transréalités accompanied an Arthur Tress exhibition at the Galerie du Château d’Eau in Toulouse. This context helps explain the book’s retrospective scope and its clear curatorial argument. The 112-page, French-English publication is substantial in scale at approximately 32 by 24 centimetres, allowing the photographs to be encountered as a connected body rather than as isolated examples.

For collectors, the book’s interest lies less in any claim of rarity than in the historical and formal continuity it establishes. It places Tress’s formative urban work beside the oneiric and constructed imagery for which he is widely associated, making visible the passage between the two. As both exhibition publication and focused survey, Transréalités offers a useful account of an artist who expanded the language of street photography by allowing cinema, theatre, memory, and fantasy to enter the frame.