The magazine of the art-form of the photo-essay
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!”
Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film & documentary maker
Nov2015 back issue
by Ken Schles
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 during the
desperate 1980s, 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.
Named photography book of the year by TIME, Mother Jones and Vogue
Italia.
Air shaft, 1983.
Boom Box Bon Fire, Brooklyn Bridge, 1983.
Boys Will Be Men, 8 B.C. 1984.
Chazz Shows His Package, 1986.
Claudia Lights Up, 1985.
Craig and Mario, 1984.
Debra Looking Back, 1983.
In Drag on Garbage Cans, 1986.
Kim Whispers Into Valerie's Ear, 1986.
Marlene and Bruno, 1985.
Philippe Nibbles Solveig's Ear, 1984.
Melanie At Veselka, 1986.
Pyramid, 1985.
Ray, 1985.
Rehersal At Darinka, 1986.
