Ken Schles Invisible City iBook

Chazz and Melanie, East Village, NYC 1985

A Special Weekend Post: Photographer Ken Schles and Matthew Johnston from the Photobook Club present the iBook version of Invisible City. You can download it for your iPad from the link below. It contains all of the original photos and text plus additional material. 

DOWNLOAD – Ken Schles: Invisible City from the iBook store.

Ken Schles (b.1960, United States) studied photography at the Cooper Union graduating in 1982. His books include: Oculus (Noorderlicht 2011), A New History of Photography: The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads (White Press 2008), The Geometry of Innocence (Hatje Cantz 2001) and Invisible City (Twelvetrees Press 1988). A reprint of Invisible City is forthcoming from Steidl. His work is included in private and public collections such as MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum and The Art Institute of Chicago, among others. Ken is an adjunct teacher at ICP and is currently a blogging correspondent for FOAM, the photography museum in Amsterdam.

About the Project:

“In 1978, when I was still 17, I moved to NYC’s East Village where I went to art school. The neighborhood was a hotbed of sociological and cultural change and we were witness to cultural phenomena that eventually would transform and dominate the larger world: AIDS and performance art; punk and hip-hop; the no-wave and new-wave movements; squats; the gay-rights movement; the downtown art scene. Upon graduation, I found my home deep within the ghetto, on Avenue B, an avenue that was dominated by a huge heroin trade. There was an insanity to the nihilistic abandon we were all feeling and trying to make sense of at the time. It was a world my friends and I embraced as our own. I struggled to come to terms with this reality I desperately needed to make sense of—if only for survival’s sake. And it was there, in that struggle, that I found my invisible city.”

“Nearly twenty-five years later I’ve come to revisit the work. Invisible City was a short run photographic book in the pre-internet age. While critically acclaimed in its time, the nature of its limited physicality left few admirers. New technology and new ways of communicating overtook that era, even while incorporating its legacies. So I feel the time is right to find new ways to share this legacy and bring this work to a new generation and a larger audience. The Photobook Club and I found each other and we both share a determination to explore technological possibilities to communicate ideas. The i Book they devised as a study of Invisible City formally presents another piece of that puzzle.”