Demand is high. I preordered both books; Invisible City's delivery date has been pushed back 2 weeks, while Night Walk's delivery date is still a mystery, but I expect it to arrive by late March - early April.
I recommend them even if it delivery times are skewered. At least you'll get a copy before they're gone.
Someone posted the pages of both books on youtube... (sorry, I don't know how to embed videos inside a post)
Invisible City:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOVl3Ae_bMU
"Perhaps one of the greatest portrayals of nocturnal urban life of the 20th Century -- certainly keeping equal company with Brassai's classic Paris de Nuit." Photo-Eye auction's curator, Eric Miles.
"hellishly brilliant." Vince Aletti, The New Yorker.
"The real image of New York is rarely clear to anyone living in it, except as tenacious sensation."
Guy Trebay, The Village Voice.
For a decade Ken Schles watched the passing of time from his Lower East Side Manhattan neighborhood. His camera has fixed the instances of his observations, and these moments become 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.
Currently out of print, copies may be found on the web.
In 1992 Invisible City was exhibited in More Than One Photography, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In that exhibit, outlining the possibilities of photography in various media, it was the sole representative for the published photographic book. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the AIGA award for book design. It also appears in 802 Photo Books from the M + M Auer Collection, a book which opens the dialog started with Andrew Roth's 101 Books; the Hasseblad Center's The Open Book and the two volumes of Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's The Photobook: A History.
Night Walk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2OeyQEyZg0
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 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
The exhibition presents a provocative narrative of lost youth and a private view of an irretrievable downtown New York as Schles saw and experienced it (The Editors Musee Magazine 2015-02-09)
The images are imbued with the same fury as those in Invisible City, but here they serve life and love. Invisible City glowed with the cinders of the East Village, while the flames in Night Walk illuminate the streets or the tops of birthday cakes. The atmosphere is intact, but the restless night walk ends with a long, romantic scene in Schles's brick apartment. From his window, we see the metal fire escapes that still today trace oblique lines across the Village's buildings. "Human beings exist in a word of fantasy," Schles told the Los Angeles Review of Book. "We trust [photographs] more than we trust memory because memory is ephemeral." Invisible City mourned a vanished city. Night Walk rebuilt it. (Laurence Cornet L'Oeil de la Photographie 2015-02-04)
The sites around his old apartment provide the backdrop for "Invisible City," a photography book from 1988 that has been reissued with a new companion volume, "Night Walk," by the German art-book imprint Steidl. The books compile photos that Mr. Schles took of his surroundings, both good and bad.
Some of the grainy, black-and-white pictures portray abandoned buildings and rubble in what looks like a war-torn country. Others focus on social life and parties in 1980s neighborhood institutions like Limbo Lounge, 8BC and ABC No Rio. (Andy Battaglia The Wall Street Journal 2015-01-30)
Ken Schles portrays New York's gritty Lower East Side in the 1980s in ''Invisible City/Night Walk, 1983-1989'' at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, Jan. 29 to March 14, an exhibition of 40 of his black-and-white photographs that coincides with the publication of ''Night Walk'' (Steidl), a companion to his underground cult classic ''Invisible City,'' 1988. Mr. Schles lived among the boarded-up buildings and heroin addicts during that decade, turning his blighted apartment into a darkroom to process photographs of a city on the edge. (The Editors International New York Times 2015-01-29)
In 1983, Ken Schles moved into an apartment on Avenue B in the East Village. His windows were boarded up because his landlord said that junkies could steal the gates with a crowbar. This worked to Schles's advantage - he set up a darkroom. Life moved at a tumultuous pace. Downstairs, a woman with three kids was a heroin addict and dealers used her apartment as a shooting gallery. The city shut down the boiler in the building, which was spewing carbon monoxide. With scenes like this playing out daily right outside his doorstep, Schles found gripping subject matter in and around the neighborhood.
The exhibition presents images from both Night Walk and Invisible City, revealing a provocative narrative of lost youth and a private view of an irretrievable downtown New York as Schles saw and experienced it. (The Editors Yahoo! News 2015-01-27)
Twenty-six years later, master printer-publisher Gerhard Steidl agreed to recreate Invisible City for a pent-up demand. While Schles sifted through the original shots, he realized there were enough for a companion book, which became Night Walk (a title he borrowed from an Octavio Paz poem). (Michael Kurcfeld Los Angeles Review of Books 2015-01-22)
Whether you have lived in New York your entire life, or have visited periodically you know that the city changes at light-speed, each new persona covering the last. Twenty five years ago, photographer Ken Schles published Invisible City a diminutive, landmark monograph which recorded a gritty, jittery black and white version of New York, populated by its denizens, in what at times looks like a war zone. The city was struggling, darker; in a kind of perpetual night. Happiness seemed fleeting, and was embraced, wherever and whenever it was found. Try as we might to polish New York's image these days as a safe, shiny, world destination Ken's vision is indelibly a part of the city as well, a part of who we were, who we are.
Commemorating the 25th anniversary of the publication, Ken is collaborating with Steidl Publishers to beautifully re-print Invisible City, along with a new monograph from the same time period, Night Walk Together, they represent a powerful portrait of a city we rarely see or talk about anymore dangerous, smoldering, sexual alive. (The Editors Spirit & Flesh 2015-01-01)
The resulting book, "Night Walk", is the retrospective glance of a father of two living in Fort Greene, in Brooklyn. It is "much more about the people and the vitality," he said. "There's an excitement about going out. In 'Invisibile city,' there's a darkness to the book." (John Leland The New York Times 2014-12-28)
Night Walk is an essential companion to the new, long-awaited reprint of Schles' gritty 1988 classic Invisible City. A document of life on Manhattan's Lower East Side as it went through the death throes of being a dirty, lawless pocket of the city, Invisible City and Night Walk evokes a sense of danger and fun in roaming through this veritable no man's land. The grainy black-and-white photos make you feel like you're falling through a dream. (Mark Murrmann Mother Jones 2014-12-23)
If you love Ken Schles book Invisible City you will be excitied about the follow up. Nearly 30 years after Invisible City. New York City alive in the eighties. East village. Shot by one of Americas most underrated photographers. Printing by Steidl these days is amazing and super close to good old Gravure printing. Finally published! (Markus Schaden Photo-Eye Blog 2014-12-11)
I recommend them even if it delivery times are skewered. At least you'll get a copy before they're gone.
Someone posted the pages of both books on youtube... (sorry, I don't know how to embed videos inside a post)
Invisible City:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOVl3Ae_bMU
"Perhaps one of the greatest portrayals of nocturnal urban life of the 20th Century -- certainly keeping equal company with Brassai's classic Paris de Nuit." Photo-Eye auction's curator, Eric Miles.
"hellishly brilliant." Vince Aletti, The New Yorker.
"The real image of New York is rarely clear to anyone living in it, except as tenacious sensation."
Guy Trebay, The Village Voice.
For a decade Ken Schles watched the passing of time from his Lower East Side Manhattan neighborhood. His camera has fixed the instances of his observations, and these moments become 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.
Currently out of print, copies may be found on the web.
In 1992 Invisible City was exhibited in More Than One Photography, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In that exhibit, outlining the possibilities of photography in various media, it was the sole representative for the published photographic book. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the AIGA award for book design. It also appears in 802 Photo Books from the M + M Auer Collection, a book which opens the dialog started with Andrew Roth's 101 Books; the Hasseblad Center's The Open Book and the two volumes of Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's The Photobook: A History.
Night Walk:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2OeyQEyZg0
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
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
The exhibition presents a provocative narrative of lost youth and a private view of an irretrievable downtown New York as Schles saw and experienced it (The Editors Musee Magazine 2015-02-09)
The images are imbued with the same fury as those in Invisible City, but here they serve life and love. Invisible City glowed with the cinders of the East Village, while the flames in Night Walk illuminate the streets or the tops of birthday cakes. The atmosphere is intact, but the restless night walk ends with a long, romantic scene in Schles's brick apartment. From his window, we see the metal fire escapes that still today trace oblique lines across the Village's buildings. "Human beings exist in a word of fantasy," Schles told the Los Angeles Review of Book. "We trust [photographs] more than we trust memory because memory is ephemeral." Invisible City mourned a vanished city. Night Walk rebuilt it. (Laurence Cornet L'Oeil de la Photographie 2015-02-04)
The sites around his old apartment provide the backdrop for "Invisible City," a photography book from 1988 that has been reissued with a new companion volume, "Night Walk," by the German art-book imprint Steidl. The books compile photos that Mr. Schles took of his surroundings, both good and bad.
Some of the grainy, black-and-white pictures portray abandoned buildings and rubble in what looks like a war-torn country. Others focus on social life and parties in 1980s neighborhood institutions like Limbo Lounge, 8BC and ABC No Rio. (Andy Battaglia The Wall Street Journal 2015-01-30)
Ken Schles portrays New York's gritty Lower East Side in the 1980s in ''Invisible City/Night Walk, 1983-1989'' at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, Jan. 29 to March 14, an exhibition of 40 of his black-and-white photographs that coincides with the publication of ''Night Walk'' (Steidl), a companion to his underground cult classic ''Invisible City,'' 1988. Mr. Schles lived among the boarded-up buildings and heroin addicts during that decade, turning his blighted apartment into a darkroom to process photographs of a city on the edge. (The Editors International New York Times 2015-01-29)
In 1983, Ken Schles moved into an apartment on Avenue B in the East Village. His windows were boarded up because his landlord said that junkies could steal the gates with a crowbar. This worked to Schles's advantage - he set up a darkroom. Life moved at a tumultuous pace. Downstairs, a woman with three kids was a heroin addict and dealers used her apartment as a shooting gallery. The city shut down the boiler in the building, which was spewing carbon monoxide. With scenes like this playing out daily right outside his doorstep, Schles found gripping subject matter in and around the neighborhood.
The exhibition presents images from both Night Walk and Invisible City, revealing a provocative narrative of lost youth and a private view of an irretrievable downtown New York as Schles saw and experienced it. (The Editors Yahoo! News 2015-01-27)
Twenty-six years later, master printer-publisher Gerhard Steidl agreed to recreate Invisible City for a pent-up demand. While Schles sifted through the original shots, he realized there were enough for a companion book, which became Night Walk (a title he borrowed from an Octavio Paz poem). (Michael Kurcfeld Los Angeles Review of Books 2015-01-22)
Whether you have lived in New York your entire life, or have visited periodically you know that the city changes at light-speed, each new persona covering the last. Twenty five years ago, photographer Ken Schles published Invisible City a diminutive, landmark monograph which recorded a gritty, jittery black and white version of New York, populated by its denizens, in what at times looks like a war zone. The city was struggling, darker; in a kind of perpetual night. Happiness seemed fleeting, and was embraced, wherever and whenever it was found. Try as we might to polish New York's image these days as a safe, shiny, world destination Ken's vision is indelibly a part of the city as well, a part of who we were, who we are.
Commemorating the 25th anniversary of the publication, Ken is collaborating with Steidl Publishers to beautifully re-print Invisible City, along with a new monograph from the same time period, Night Walk Together, they represent a powerful portrait of a city we rarely see or talk about anymore dangerous, smoldering, sexual alive. (The Editors Spirit & Flesh 2015-01-01)
The resulting book, "Night Walk", is the retrospective glance of a father of two living in Fort Greene, in Brooklyn. It is "much more about the people and the vitality," he said. "There's an excitement about going out. In 'Invisibile city,' there's a darkness to the book." (John Leland The New York Times 2014-12-28)
Night Walk is an essential companion to the new, long-awaited reprint of Schles' gritty 1988 classic Invisible City. A document of life on Manhattan's Lower East Side as it went through the death throes of being a dirty, lawless pocket of the city, Invisible City and Night Walk evokes a sense of danger and fun in roaming through this veritable no man's land. The grainy black-and-white photos make you feel like you're falling through a dream. (Mark Murrmann Mother Jones 2014-12-23)
If you love Ken Schles book Invisible City you will be excitied about the follow up. Nearly 30 years after Invisible City. New York City alive in the eighties. East village. Shot by one of Americas most underrated photographers. Printing by Steidl these days is amazing and super close to good old Gravure printing. Finally published! (Markus Schaden Photo-Eye Blog 2014-12-11)
