Showing posts with label Ken Schles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ken Schles. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

'Invisible City' at Theatre 80 tomorrow night



Photographer Ken Schles is giving a free presentation tomorrow night from 6-7 at Theatre 80.

Schles, a Brooklyn native, lived in the East Village in the 1980s. His black-and-white photos from this period are the backdrop for the book "Invisible City" from 1988. A companion volume, "Night Walk," came out in 2014.

"New York always has stories about what the city used to be," he told The Wall Street Journal back in January. "I think it's up to all of us to take what we've been given and try to see beyond, to make it something new. That's what this was for me."

We asked Schles, who now lives in Fort Greene, what people can expect from his talk.

"I'll be showing images from 'Invisible City' and 'Night Walk' as well as the video trailers with music by Live Skull and Sonic Youth and telling some of the stories from when I moved to the East Village when I was 17, how I ended up on Avenue B, what the neighborhood was like and what happened when the landlord abandoned the building. I'll talk about how I came to make these two books — especially 'Night Walk' more recently. I'll have copies of some of my books for a book signing at the end. I timed the talk at about 50 minutes. That'll give me time to take questions ..."

You can read more about Schles and see some of his 1980s photos from the neighborhood in this feature at the Times.

Theatre 80 is at 80 St. Marks Place between First Avenue and Second Avenue. Find the Facebook event page here.

Sunday, December 28, 2014

A 1980s 'Night Walk' in downtown NYC


[Screengrab from the "Night Watch" trailer]

The Times has a feature today on Ken Schles, who spent part of the 1980s living and taking photographs in the East Village.

He now has a follow-up to his 1988 book "Invisible City" titled "Night Walk."

Here's a description of the book:

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, 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's a trailer for the book...



Schles, who now lives in Fort Greene, "rejected the recent tendency to view the East Village of the 1980s as a golden age of louche glamour," according to the Times. "A lot of dysfunction has been romanticized," he said.

The book "is dedicated to the memory of those who died in the scourge of AIDS and violence that gripped the East Village during the 1980s."