CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/10/2015

Ken Schles: Night Walk

"I lay these fragments before you," photographer Ken Schles writes in Night Walk, the acclaimed contemporary companion to his pioneering 1988 photobook Invisible City, available now in a masterfully-printed new edition by Steidl. "What has since been rebuilt now reverts back to its former state of skeletal ruin. The dead reappear, hurry about and whisper their siren songs into your ear. Where once the journey was open-ended and uncertain, it now leads to an inevitable end. The living recognize in the past only what the living choose to remember or refuse to forget. In truth the past never reveals itself so readily or so fully—for even the dead once lived lives of complication and consequence, immeasurably filled with uncertainty and price. The man speaks to the boy now. He cannot help but to try to tell him what was meant to be seen; what he hopes will be remembered. All else has been annihilated. I lay these fragments before you, so that you may remember them too." Easily one of the best photobooks of 2014, Night Walk concludes with a dedication to the memory of those who died "in the scourge of AIDS and violence that gripped the East Village during the 1980s." Work from both books can be seen through Saturday at Howard Greenberg Gallery.