CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/15/2014

Ken Schles Book Signing at Dashwood

Dashwood Books launches two exquisite new releases by New York photographer Ken Schles, published simultaneously by Steidl. Invisible City is the much anticipated reprint of Schles' modern classic, first published by Twelvetree Press in 1988. Night Walk is a substantive and intimate chronicle of New York's last pre-Internet bohemian outpost, a stream of consciousness portrayal that peels back layers of petulance and squalor to find the frisson and striving of a life lived amongst the rubble.

ABOVE: Images from Invisible City.

For a decade Schles watched the passing of time from his Lower East Side neighborhood. His camera fixed the instances of his observations, and these moments became the foundation of his invisible city. Friends and architecture come under the scrutiny of his lens and, when sorted and viewed in the pages of this book, a remarkable achievement of personal vision emerges.

ABOVE: An image from Night Walk.

Twenty-five years later Schles revisits his archive in Night Walk and fashions a narrative of lost youth: a delirious, peripatetic walk in the evening air of an irretrievable Downtown New York as he saw and experienced it. Here, Schles embodies the flâneur as Sontag defines it, as a "connoisseur of empathy," "cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes." We see in Night Walk a new and revelatory Ulysses for the 21st century: a searching tale of wonder and desire, life and love in the dying hulk of a ruined American city.