In 1969, Arthur Tress, 85, lived on 72nd Street and Riverside Drive, two blocks from Central Park. He was 29 and working on a park project in New York City, called Open Space in the Inner City, which focused on neglected areas on the periphery. “In the 1890s, Frederick Law Olmsted built Central Park with all its lagoons and walls, but left 32 hectares to be used as a wilder area: this was the Ramble, a place where people could get lost in. It was totally artificial, with gigantic rocks and small walls, but it looked like a jungle area in the middle of the city,” Tress tells EL PAÍS.
In 1969, New York City was in a financial crisis, so many parks were neglected, including the Ramble area of Central Park. “Since the 1920s, gay men had used it for cruising,” Tress explains. “It was like a small gay islet. I went there for a bit of nature and silence but also to cruise. One day, I took my camera. At first, I photographed people from afar, among the trees. Then I started approaching people sitting on rocks or benches to take portraits. Of course, many said no. At that time being gay was illegal; they might have been married or teachers. No one wanted to take too much of a risk. However, others were interested in the project.”
Black and white film was key to Tress’ work, and the shots taken in the Ramble are among the best examples of this artist’s career which spanned more than 60 years: “It felt more graphic and better captured the mood I wanted to convey. At that time, work that acted as social commentary in the world of graphic arts was often in black and white,” he explains.
“When I started with this project, it was the middle of winter, the trees had lost their leaves and the place looked like a Gothic forest, almost like an Ingmar Bergman movie. That became a metaphor for the alienation of gay people at the time, and I think these weren’t just snapshots: I was trying to evoke an emotion.”
Tress smiles when considering the time it has taken for those photographs to be published in a book — The Ramble, NYC 1969 — and the difficulty involved at the time of trying to get them published in popular publications before the taboo was broken. “I think the credit goes to Jim Gantz,” he says. “When he was appointed curator at the Getty Museum, he thought that my work had been a bit forgotten, and he became a kind of defender of my work. We did a book together called San Francisco 1964, about the summer I spent there photographing people. Years later, while we were going through the contact sheets of the Open Space project, he discovered the photos of the Ramble. He asked me what they were. I explained that I had photographed gay men in 1969, but I was never able to publish them. Neither Life nor Time magazine were going to do it. So, they had remained in a box. He was the first to publish those photos as part of the Getty catalog.”
British publisher Stanley/Barker has completed the mission: “They loved the Ramble series and decided to make this book, which they presented at Paris Photo. It turned out to be one of the first graphic documents on gay cruising that also portrays a very particular moment in the evolution of the movement, because it was only a few months before the Stonewall riots, which brought total change. The men I met on the Ramble, and myself, lived very hidden lives. We were afraid of being discovered; you could lose your job,” Tress says, adding that it wasn’t easy at home either.
“My sister was an activist, 10 years older than me. When she told my mother that she was gay, my mother never spoke to her again. We come from a religious family. That was very typical, and it still happens. I told my father I was gay when I was 17, and he thought I should see a psychiatrist. The American Psychiatric Association considered homosexuality a mental illness. All psychiatrists had that manual on their desk. They said it was illegal and unnatural: we needed 20 years of protests to make them change their minds,” he says.
“With the Ramble I wanted to show that cruising was also a form of socializing, almost like high school: there were cliques. Part of it had to do with finding fantasy lovers. Many attractive people got into that game. Things have changed and today people have found alternative ways of relating. I have many gay friends who are either married or in a relationship in San Francisco. I think it’s wonderful that this situation exists, at least for now,” says the photographer, who remembers the era illustrated in his book perfectly.
“If you met someone on the Ramble, even if you had sex with them, you couldn’t look them in the eye or give them your name. Maybe you could swap phone numbers, but most of the encounters were one-night stands, totally casual. That had an emotional cost. Most people are looking for love and connection, and that dynamic created an atmosphere of tension and frustration. I think that comes over in parts of the book.”
The Stonewall riots are another of Tress’s references. The Stonewall Inn was a bar in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood of New York frequented by the gay community. Tired of police harassment and frequent raids for purely homophobic reasons, dozens of customers attacked various police officers in a series of incidents that started in the early hours of June 28, 1969, and lasted for six days. The riots are considered the genesis of a radical change in the perception of the collective. “After Stonewall, gay men started looking for other ways to connect. Before, they could only be found in bars full of smoke, noise and alcohol. Hiking clubs, theater, dinners, baseball teams, therapy groups emerged. I attended a few groups where they talked about how to form relationships. We didn’t know how to do it,” he says.
Tress continues to use the same camera, a Hasselblad. He does not work in digital and continues to photograph in black and white. He has worked as an educational editor on indigenous peoples: the Maya, rickshaw drivers in India, Laplanders in Sweden. “I wrote about their ceremonies, taboos and cultures. I have always been interested in the behavioral archetypes that exist even in our contemporary world. That’s what The Ramble is about. Photographing gay men, faggots as they were called then in Central Park. I was part of that tribe. I had a deep understanding of what was happening precisely because of that.”
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