From Sheldon D’s article on Arthur Tress’ newest book for Flashbak:
For a little over a year, Tress returned again and again, recording the everyday choreography of cruising and creating what is now recognised as the earliest known photographic record of outdoor cruising in a natural setting.
His images show the flow of men through the Ramble, some caught from a distance, others posed or gently staged in small scenes. He saw these photographs not just as documentation but as a kind of queer still life, part allegory, part dream.
Long unseen, The Ramble is now considered a vital piece of New York’s queer history, part ethnography, part fantasy. More than fifty years later, it stands alongside a new generation of queer landscape projects that share its quiet focus on how bodies, longing, and hidden places shape each other.