Ken Schles photographer

Invisible City: Photographs by Ken Schles
Twelvetrees Press, 1988. Pasadena, California.

"hellishly brilliant." — Vince Aletti, The New Yorker.

"The real image of New York is rarely clear to anyone living in it, except as tenacious sensation."
— Guy Trebay, The Village Voice.

For a decade Ken Schles watched the passing of time from his Lower East Side Manhattan neighborhood. His camera has fixed the instances of his observations, and these moments become the foundation of his invisible city. Friends and architecture come under the scrutiny of his lens and, when sorted and viewed in the pages of this book, a remarkable achievement of personal vision emerges.

To read reviews click here.
To view part of the book, click here or on its cover.
Currently out of print, copies may be found on the web here. A page-by-page turn video of the complete book can be seen here. Of interest also might be this Photo Book Club study of Invisible City.

In 1992 Invisible City was exhibited in More Than One Photography, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In that exhibit, outlining the possibilities of photography in various media, it was the sole representative for the published photographic book. It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and won the AIGA award for book design. It also appears in 802 Photo Books from the M + M Auer Collection, a book which opens the dialog started with Andrew Roth's 101 Books; the Hasseblad Center's The Open Book and the two volumes of Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's The Photobook: A History.