Arthur Tress’ photographs taken in The Ramble are a key part of New York’s queer history

A man stares at us wide-eyed as he crouches on a rock, cradling his hands close, a desolate wilderness rising behind him. It could be an eerie photograph from a 1960s horror film, but its presence in a new book, The Ramble, NYC 1969, places it amid the early work of photographer Arthur Tress. In 1969, he captured gay men, like himself, cruising around The Ramble, a forested area in New York’s Central Park, the winter before the Stonewall riots and the shift in gay rights movements that would follow.

'A [term] for gay people at the time was twilight people,’ says Tress, dialling in from his studio on a mid-winter Friday morning. ‘You couldn’t tell your family, you couldn’t tell your employer – especially if you worked for the government or in education.' He recalls his parents sending him to a psychiatrist when he was in high school. 'Of course, he told me being gay was bad, against the law, unnatural and that I should get a girlfriend,' he laughs. 'Which didn’t really work out.'

The Ramble was ten minutes away from where Tress lived on 72nd Riverside, and the moment he stepped into its world of hidden gestures, hankies and leather, he felt a fellowship with the other gay men, whom he imagined also shared his low self-esteem, stemming from the shame of doing something illegal. There were many who didn’t want to be photographed, recalls Tress, as they could lose their jobs. 'There was a crippling anxiety,' he says. 'Somehow, as a photographer, I could bring that out of them – almost like I was a director of a film.'

While Tress’ photographs might seem like merely documentation, the photographer was also showing a greater truth of the men, who revealed their emotional turmoil. 'In the late 1960s there was a strong move towards documentary,' he says. 'But we went against that with staging.' He had encountered the abstract expressionist works of George Tooker and Paul Cadmus at The Whitney when he was in high school, and from them he extracted an essence of isolation amid stark architectures of modernity, which percolated into this series.

Physique magazines were circulating at the time, but Tress wasn’t particularly inspired by them, cheekily mentioning that they might have inspired Robert Mapplethorpe, but he wanted to find a deeper recess within the psyche. Drawing on the magic realism of the artists he admired, Tress created a surreal world where men pop up from underground like phantoms, or lie spent on a tree trunk, like a modern-day vanquished warrior. 'That’s very dreamlike,' he smiles. 'I think as a child I lived in an escape world of fantasy, and I tried to embed these photos with that quality.'

Cruising was like photography for Tress, with prolonged waiting to catch the eye of other men. 'I was a Ramble wallflower,' he laughs. 'There was a lot of rejection – but after Stonewall, you could meet men at a gay community centre or a student dance and hold hands in public.'

Arthur Tress, 'The Ramble, NYC 1969' is published by Stanley / Barker, £60, stanleybarker.co.uk