Invisible City
1989
£260.00
Invisible City by Ken Schles. First edition (1989). First impression from 1989 in fine condition. Signed dated and located (Brooklyn 2018) to front endpage. No markings, pages clean, binding firm, jacket in removable protective sleeve. Please see pictures. PayPal accepted, any questions please get in touch.
About Invisible City
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. Shot entirely in gritty, impressionistic 35mm black-and-white. Invisible City and Night Walk are part of a long tradition of personal social documentary photography that includes William Klein. As well as. Robert Frank, Daido Moriyama, and Nan Goldin, as well as more recent examples like Ryan McGinley.
Like his contemporary Nan Goldin, Schles’s snapshot aesthetic is intensely personal and comes from a common photographic desire to document, record, and preserve one’s life and surroundings. Lovers and friends are regular characters, but we’re also given a broader perspective into a small segment of New York City’s fringes. Casual portraits are interspersed with images of garbage-strewn streets or found details, like an abandoned baby carriage in an empty hallway. Throughout his images, Schles makes ample use of blur and grain, as well as a variety of different light sources, from a bright flash to a single light bulb, to illuminate his subjects. At times the scenes are shocking—like the burning buildings or half-naked addicts strung out on a filthy toilet—but other times they are tender, as with the images of a man stepping from a tenement bath or the young couple watching distant fireworks from their roof.
