Invisible City: Photographs by Ken Schles (first edition, 1988)

“It was almost 10 years after Gerald Ford told New York City to drop dead that a young Ken Schles picked up a camera and began to document his life in the East Village and Alphabet City. (T)he sentiment was taken to heart by many in the city, and drove those who did care into tight-knit bands, dedicating to saving the place they called home, or just staying alive in it. Those same impulses drove Schles’s photography of his surroundings, friends, and neighborhood in the 1980s. The images(…) reveal a city in flux, beset by crime and urban neglect but also brimming with life and youthful energy.” —Adam Bell, Brooklyn Rail, 2015

Rare copy of this gritty cult-classic collection of inky black-and-white urban photography that’s been compared to the work of Brassai, Robert Frank, and Nan Goldin. “Schles has a canny eye for subverting what appears to be playful innocence. The world, his pictures suggest, is a particular thing, but not what we think it is. As he put it, the photographs capture moments of raw truth in the midst of deception.’” (Thomas Beller, from a review on the artist’s website)

Scarce! First edition of the 1988 Twelvetrees Press release, limited to 2000 copies. VF. ISBN 0-942642-35-X [YA3]

$ 700.00