Stanley/Barker has released "The Ramble, NYC 1969," a groundbreaking photography collection by Arthur Tress that documents a pivotal moment in New York's queer history. The book captures Tress's work from 1959, when he began bringing his camera during walks through the Ramble, an overgrown section of Central Park that had become New York's most famous outdoor meeting place for queer men.
Originally designed in the 19th century as a picturesque woodland area, the Ramble had transformed by the late 1960s into a wild, hidden, and half-forgotten space that facilitated chance encounters in the heart of the city. For just over a year, Tress returned to this location repeatedly, documenting the daily choreography of cruising and creating what is now recognized as the first known photographic record of outdoor cruising in a natural environment.
Tress's images reveal the flow of men through the Ramble, with some subjects captured from a distance while others were posed or gently staged in small vignettes. The photographer viewed these photographs not merely as documents, but as a form of queer still life, existing somewhere between allegory and dream. His approach combined ethnographic observation with artistic fantasy, creating a unique visual record of this hidden world.
Long invisible to the public, "The Ramble" is now considered an essential piece of New York's queer history. More than fifty years later, the work has found its place alongside a new generation of queer landscape projects that share the same discreet attention to how bodies, desire, and hidden places mutually shape one another. This publication represents the first time this remarkable body of work has been made available as a complete collection.
"Cruising had a lot in common with photography – a lot of time spent waiting for the moment, like one of those white egrets standing in a pond, waiting to catch the fish," Tress reflected on his work. His observation captures the patience and precision required both for his photographic practice and the social rituals he documented.
The book serves as both a historical document and an artistic statement, offering the first portrait of a hidden world, a wild corner of the city, and an artist discovering himself among the trees. "The Ramble" provides crucial insight into queer urban geography and the ways marginalized communities have historically claimed and transformed public spaces for their own purposes.
Published by Stanley/Barker, the hardcover edition features a dust jacket with screen printing across 112 pages in a 31 x 31 cm format. The publication marks a significant moment in making this important photographic work accessible to contemporary audiences and scholars interested in both queer history and the evolution of documentary photography.
