A Tour Through Central Park's Cruising Grounds

"Most of them are oddly charged, dramatically staged images meant to evoke dreams, nightmares, or fantasies. Many of the best-known photos from a series with children, published in 1972 as "The Dream Collector," could be frames from a David Lynch film. Much of the subsequent work Tress made was similarly theatrical but tended to involve homoerotic scenes. In one picture, a slim teen-ager reaches over tentatively, tenderly, to peel a bandage off another boy's bare thigh, a moment both touching and wonderfully matter-of-fact."

"Tress's new book, " The Ramble, NYC 1969" (Stanley/Barker), and a related exhibition currently at the Clamp gallery, in Chelsea, makes me rethink all this. The work was made concurrently with another series, "Open Space in the Inner City: Ecology and the Urban Environment." The Ramble, a wooded area on the center-west side of Central Park, was its own "urban environment." But Tress's prime interest was in the people he found there: mostly good-looking but otherwise unremarkable young"

An established photographer produced charged, dramatically staged images in the 1970s that evoke dreams, nightmares, and fantasies. A 1972 series with children presented cinematic, Lynch-like frames; later work continued theatrical themes and explored homoerotic interactions with tenderness and matter-of-fact intimacy. The approach shared narrative ambitions with contemporaries who sought to expand photography beyond documentary limits. A 1969 series set in Central Park's Ramble captures mostly attractive but otherwise ordinary young men within a wooded urban refuge, linking urban ecology to intimate human encounters and inviting reevaluation through a recent presentation and exhibition of the work.

Read at The New Yorker