Synopsis
Twenty-five years after the printing of 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 find the frisson and striving of a life lived amongst the rubble. 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.
Review
A TIME magazine photobook of the year (2014) "Ken Schles' Invisible City captured the zeitgeist of New York just as Weegee and Klein did before him. His newest book, Night Walk, culled from work in his archive, transports us along the same streets during the same bygone era as Invisible City, but bring[s] us to a new visceral destination. Night Walk, and a newly issued reprint of Invisible City―both capture the sensuous photo-gravure of the original Invisible City―and are published by Steidl." --Jason Eskenazi for TIME.
Photo-Eye Best Book "New York City alive in the eighties: East Village. Shot by one of Americas most underrated photographers. Printing by Steidl ...amazing." Selected by Markus Schaden
Vogue Italia "A beguiling love letter to the fabled East Village in New York City. Revelatory in its sense of moment, the work is a journey into memory and a past replete with celebration and loneliness. [Invisible City] Together with Night Walk, are must books for those interested in New York but more, to anyone interested in the edge of life." James Wellford for Vogue Italia, Photobooks That Defined 2014
"quintessential New York pictures ...crackle with youthful electricity." "Schles' two photobooks are remarkably distinct... Invisible City is tightly edited, an expressive, non-linear arrangement of impressions and emotions; Night Walk is much more sprawling, following the loose arc of a single aggregate night, stringing us out from party to party and club to club until we reach the lazy warm embrace of the morning. (Loring Knoblauch, Collector Daily 2015-02-24)
"[Night] Walk sings... The reality is that as we age, we get a little wiser... [Night] Walk feels expansive in ways that City feels restrictive... [Night] Walk both echoes the times and circumstances under which the photographs were made, but also our times and circumstances, the things we do (or don't do), the things we share (and don't share). Seen that way, Night Walk does what it needs to be doing, given our cities' lives: it references the past as much as the present and the future." (JM Colberg, Conscientious Photo Magazine 2015-03-23)
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