In 1969, Arthur Tress began taking his camera with him on walks through the Ramble, an overgrown corner of Central Park that had become New York’s best-known outdoor meeting place for queer men. Designed as a picturesque woodland in the nineteenth century, by the late 1960s it had grown wild, a hidden, half-forgotten place of chance encounters in the middle of the city.

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.

Stanley/Barker 2025

ISBN 978-1606068618

12×12 in.

112 Pages