{"id":314588,"date":"2026-02-28T10:55:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-28T10:55:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/314588\/"},"modified":"2026-02-28T10:55:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-28T10:55:11","slug":"photographer-arthur-tress-captures-cruising-in-new-york-in-1969-it-was-a-form-of-socializing-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/314588\/","title":{"rendered":"Photographer Arthur Tress captures cruising in New York in 1969: \u2018It was a form of socializing\u2019 | Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

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. \u201cIn 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>, 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,\u201d Tress tells EL PA\u00cdS.<\/p>\n

In 1969, New York City was in a financial crisis<\/a>, so many parks were neglected, including the Ramble area of Central Park. \u201cSince the 1920s, gay men had used it for cruising,\u201d Tress explains. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Black and white film was key to Tress\u2019 work, and the shots taken in the Ramble are among the best examples of this artist\u2019s career which spanned more than 60 years: \u201cIt 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,\u201d he explains. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen 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<\/a>. That became a metaphor for the alienation of gay people at the time, and I think these weren\u2019t just snapshots: I was trying to evoke an emotion.\u201d<\/p>\n

Photograph taken by Arthur Tress in 1969 in Central Park and included in his new book. Arthur Tress (Ed. Stanley\/Barker)<\/p>\n

Tress smiles when considering the time it has taken for those photographs to be published in a book \u2014 The Ramble, NYC 1969 \u2014 and the difficulty involved at the time of trying to get them published in popular publications before the taboo was broken. \u201cI think the credit goes to Jim Gantz,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

British publisher Stanley\/Barker has completed the mission: \u201cThey 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<\/a>, 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,\u201d Tress says, adding that it wasn\u2019t easy at home either. <\/p>\n

\u201cMy 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,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith 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\u2019s wonderful that this situation exists, at least for now,\u201d says the photographer, who remembers the era illustrated in his book perfectly. <\/p>\n

\u201cIf you met someone on the Ramble, even if you had sex with them, you couldn\u2019t 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<\/a>, and that dynamic created an atmosphere of tension and frustration. I think that comes over in parts of the book.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Stonewall riots are another of Tress\u2019s 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. \u201cAfter 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\u2019t know how to do it,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI wrote about their ceremonies, taboos and cultures. I have always been interested in the behavioral archetypes that exist even in our contemporary world. That\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sign up for our weekly newsletter<\/a> to get more English-language news coverage from EL PA\u00cdS USA Edition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In 1969, Arthur Tress, 85, lived on 72nd Street and Riverside Drive, two blocks from Central Park. He…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":314589,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[157303,437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46,157304],"class_list":["post-314588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-agencia-getty","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-revista-time"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=314588"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314588\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=314588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=314588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=314588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}