Ken Schles

For a decade, Ken 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. Twenty-five years later, Invisible City still has the ability to transfix the viewer. A penetrating and intimate portrayal of a world few had entrance to--or means of egress from--Invisible City stands alongside Brassai's Paris de Nuit and van der Elsken's Love On The Left Bank as one of the twentieth century's great depictions of nocturnal bohemian experience. Documenting his life in New York City's East Village during its heyday in the tumultuous 1980s, Schles captured its look and attitude in delirious and dark honesty. Long out of print, this "missing link" in the history of the photographic book is now once again made available. Using scans from the original negatives and Steidl's five-plate technique to bring out nuance and detail never seen before, this new edition transcends the original of this underground cult classic.

Twenty-five years after his seminal 1988 book, Invisible City, Ken Schles revisits his archive 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. 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 expose the frisson and striving of a life lived amongst the rubble. Here Schles embodies the flâneur as Susan 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 twenty-first century--a searching tale of wonder and desire, life and love in the dying hulk of a ruined American city.

Twelve years after the legendary success of his first book of photographs, Invisible City, Ken Schles returns with his long-awaited sophomore effort, The Geometry of Innocence. Schles's focus is on the relentless shifting of social structures and spaces that mark the urban landscape of today. His images form a kind of visual roller coaster, sending the viewer onto city streets and playgrounds, into pubs and bars, putting the viewer inside a police helicopter and taking them to death row, hospital rooms, and police interventions. While there is no "story" per se, this breathless sequence of pictures is condensed into thematic clusters, providing a spellbinding and almost physically palpable experience. The works in The Geometry of Innocence address and play upon the immediacy and relativity of meaning in the photographic image, creating a bold and highly nuanced artistic statement.