[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."