Toward the end of 1968, Arthur Tress started bringing along his Hasselblad camera on visits to the Ramble. Designed as a paragon of the picturesque in the mid-nineteenth century, the artificial woodland in the middle of New York’s Central Park had become overgrown and derelict, a shadowy cloister teeming with men and queer people in search of erotic contact. It wasn’t just cruising and sex that attracted individuals, as gay journalist Doug Ireland pointed out in New York in 1978: “The sun, the strolling, even the solitude, and the natural beauty of the park’s most bucolic copse—more than the opportunity for a casual sexual encounter in the bushes—are the magnets that for much of this century have made the Ramble the city’s best-known outdoor gathering place for gays.”
From Tress’s apartment on 72nd Street and Riverside Drive, the Ramble was just a ten-minute walk, and he photographed the ebbs and flow of cruising a couple of days a month for about a year, which coincided with the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village. Earlier in the 1960s, he had traveled widely as an ethnographic photographer, documenting the rituals and customs of the Maya in Mexico and the Dogon in West Africa. Having recently returned to New York, Tress, then in his late twenties, saw the Ramble series as an ethnographic study of the mores of a subculture to which he belonged. While some photos conjure the Arcadian wonders of a fête galante by Antoine Watteau, most capture the loneliness of loitering and meandering, offering a critical commentary on the choreography of cruising, whether one was a leather daddy, hippie street kid, or closet queen walking a poodle. The act of cruising, Tress found, had much in common with photography. “When you’re doing photography, there’s a lot of waiting around for the moment,” he says, “like one of those white egrets standing in a pond, waiting to get the fish.”
The series ranges from surreptitious shots of men from behind at a distance to more staged portraits—a surrealist style that would come to define Tress’s central contribution to photography, as exemplified by his scenes of homoerotic fantasy taken on the West Side Piers and at the abandoned YMCA off Riverside Drive, his primary cruising grounds in the 1970s. For the shy artist, the Ramble project provided an excuse to approach men and ask for permission to photograph them (unsurprisingly, most refused). Sometimes he charmed them into acting out narrative scenes or even, once or twice, coming back to his apartment. After decades of considering the Ramble series a solely personal project, as publishing or exhibiting these pictures would have been taboo at the time of their composition, Tress has been lately revisiting this doggedly queer work. Just like cruising on its most fulfilling days, the reemergence of this unparalleled archive is well worth the wait.
—Jackson Davidow