From Jordan Tannahill’s interview with Arthur Tress for Interview Magazine:

In the 1960s, when the photographer Arthur Tress began photographing The Ramble, the shadowy and overgrown stretch of Central Park that’s served as a cruising ground for gay men for nearly a century, he hadn’t considered that the images he was capturing might one day find an enthusiastic audience, let alone be considered either art or ethnography. “They were mostly for myself,” he explains, “but I had a sense that they were historically important.” Over 50 years later, Tress’s photographs—noirish, dreamlike scenes in which men lurk and leer, wait and watch—are getting their due. This month marks the publication of The Ramble, NYC 1969—with an exhibition at Clamp Gallery to follow—the very first collection of Tress’s Ramble photographs and a vital, provocative document of a time when queer city life happened largely in the shadows. “It was a kind of social commentary on the paranoia, anxiety, loneliness, and frustration of gay men at that period,” the photographer told Prince Faggot playwright Jordan Tannahill last month. “We really don’t like that self-image of the wounded homosexual. But I think what’s going to make these pictures interesting to people is that we’re ready to acknowledge that part of ourselves.” Below, the two have a wide-ranging conversation about hierarchies, hanky codes, and the art of cruising—then and now.

Read the full article from Interview Magazine

Browse the exhibition “Arthur Tress | The Ramble” at CLAMP
Browse all of Arthur Tress’s work at CLAMP