The Ramble’s ever-shifting population was more various than any gay bar’s. When Tress started taking his camera to the Park, he photographed some men “surreptitiously” but often asked first if it was O.K. For many, it wasn’t. Even if gay sex was beginning to be decriminalized at the time, a lot of the men who cruised for sex were married or closeted or otherwise on the down-low. We can’t know much about the men who did agree to be seen in Tress’s pictures, only that they comprise a small part of the population that used these paths as meeting places and hunting grounds before the sun went down. But are these photographs performances or documents? How much does Tress’s subjects’ consent compromise the “truth” of these pictures? “My work has always been a little bit of improvised, stage-directed imagery,” Tress told Tannahill. He calls it “poetic documentary.”