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'Invisible City / Night Walk, 1983-1989': Ken Schles documents NYC's Lower East Side in the 80's

A gritty and penetrating portrayal of New York’s Lower East Side in the 1980s by Ken Schles will be on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery from January 29 – March 14, 2015. The exhibition of 40 black and white photographs coincides with the publication of a new Steidl monograph, Night Walk (2014), a companion to Schles’s underground cult classic Invisible City (1988). Recently reprinted by Steidl, Invisible City is considered alongside Brassaï’s Paris de Nuit and Ed van der Elksen’s Love On The Left Bank to be one of the great depictions of the nocturnal bohemian experience of the 20th century. An opening reception with the artist will be held on Thursday, January 29 from 6-8 p.m.

In 1983, Ken Schles moved into an apartment on Avenue B in the East Village. His windows were boarded up because his landlord said that junkies could steal the gates with a crowbar. This worked to Schles’s advantage – he set up a darkroom. Life moved at a tumultuous pace. Downstairs, a woman with three kids was a heroin addict and dealers used her apartment as a shooting gallery. The city shut down the boiler in the building, which was spewing carbon monoxide. With scenes like this playing out daily right outside his doorstep, Schles found gripping subject matter in and around the neighborhood. The exhibition presents images from both Night Walk and Invisible City, revealing a provocative narrative of lost youth and a private view of an irretrievable downtown New York as Schles saw and experienced it. Among the highlights of the show is Drowned in Sorrow, 1984, depicting a shabbily glamorous woman in a short dress, torn stockings and heels, lying across a couch while talking on a corded telephone. The headline of the Village Voice on the plank wood floor reads “Drowned in Sorrow.” In Limelight (Suzie Streetwalker, Ellen Kenneally, Nick Egan and Johnny Dynell), 1983, Schles captures the nightlife of his time as a woman in white sits on a ledge, vacant and alone with a drink in her hand, while three club denizens in the foreground chat and laugh. In Burning Building with Moonrise, 1984, neighbors stand and watch as a tenement goes up in flames with the full moon rising above the urban landscape. (Howard Greenberg Gallery)

(Photographs by Ken Schles)

A byword for New Year’s Eve parties: How much fun you have often depends on where you’re standing. Ken Schles, 54, spent the mid-1980s living and taking photographs in the East Village, and twice he edited his work into books — the first time when the photos were taken, and the second time more recently. The differences in mood are striking. The first book, “Invisible City” (1988), which Mr. Schles created while living on a drug-ravaged block on Avenue B, reflects the turmoil and death in his life at the time. “My friends were dying of AIDS, and I was living in an abandoned building,” he said. A quarter of a century later, when he went back to the work, it was as someone who had survived the era, and the images revealed themselves to him in a different light. The resulting book, “Night Walk”(2014), is the retrospective glance of a father of two living in Fort Greene, in Brooklyn. It is “much more about the people and the vitality,” he said. “There’s an excitement about going out. In ‘Invisible City,’ there’s a darkness to the book.”

Images from both books will be displayed at the Howard Greenberg Galleryon East 57th Street starting Jan. 29.

Yet Mr. Schles, who studied photography at the Cooper Union and the New School, rejected the recent tendency to view the East Village of the 1980s as a golden age of louche glamour. As much as anything, he said, he remembers people wanting to get out: artists into better galleries, residents into less chaotic climes. Often, he said, he was afraid of the people around him. “I don’t pine for the days when I’d drive down the Bowery and have to lock the doors, or having to step over the junkies or finding the door bashed in because heroin dealers decided they wanted to set up a shooting gallery,” he said. “A lot of dysfunction has been romanticized.”