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Night Walk: Twenty-five years after the printing of his seminal 1988 book, Invisible City, Ken 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 and 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, Schles embodies the flâneur as Sontag defines it, as a "connoisseur of empathy... cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes." We see in Night Walk a new and revelatory Ulysses for the 21st century: a searching tale of wonder and desire, life and love in the dying hulk of a ruined American city. 

A TIME magazine photobook of the year: "Ken Schles' Invisible City captured the zeitgeist of New York just as Weegee and Klein did before him. His newest book, Night Walk, culled from work in his archive, transports us along the same streets during the same bygone era as Invisible City, but bring[s] us to a new visceral destination. Night Walk, and a newly issued reprint of Invisible City--both capture the sensuous photo-gravure of the original Invisible City and are published by Steidl." — Jason Eskenazi for TIME magazine.

A Mother Jones Photobook of the year: "A document of life on Manhattan's Lower East Side as it went through the death throes of being a dirty, lawless pocket of the city ...Night Walk evokes a sense of danger and fun in roaming through this veritable no man's land. The grainy black-and-white photos make you feel like you're falling through a dream." — Mark Murrmann, Photo Director, Mother Jones

Vogue Italia "A beguiling love letter to the fabled East Village in New York City. Revelatory in its sense of moment, the work is a journey into memory and a past replete with celebration and loneliness. [Invisible City] Together with Night Walk, are must books for those interested in New York but more, to anyone interested in the edge of life." — James Wellford for Vogue Italia 

Photo-Eye Best Book of 2014 "New York City alive in the eighties: East Village. Shot by one of Americas most underrated photographers. Printing by Steidl... amazing." — Markus Schaden for Photo-Eye

[Night] Walk sings... [Night] Walk both echoes the times and circumstances under which the photographs were made, but also our times and circumstances, the things we do (or don't do), the things we share (and don't share). Seen that way, Night Walk does what it needs to be doing... it references the past as much as the present and the future." — JM Colberg, Conscientious Photo Magazine 2015-03-23 

"Poetic and direct. Raw and dark. A brilliant portrait of a city in decline and the people living in it." — Rianne van Dijck, NRC Handelsblad (The Netherlands) 2015-04-16

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Texts by Ken Schles and T.S. Eliot. Book design by Ken Schles. Cover design by Sarah Winter. Published by Steidl. 160 pages, 9.1 x 6.8 in. / 23,2 x 17,3 cm, 106 photographs, quadratone, clothbound hardcover with dust jacket. ISBN 978-3-86930-692-6 

Bio: Ken Schles, a native New Yorker and NYFA fellow, is the author of five monographs. Exhibited by The Museum of Modern Art, noted by the New York Times Book Review, cited in histories of the medium (Parr/Badger, Auer & Auer, 10x10 American Photobooks) and issued by some of the foremost publishers of our time (Steidl, Hatje Cantz, Twelvetrees Press), Ken Schles' books are considered "intellectual milestones in photography" (Süddeutsche Zeitung), "hellishly brilliant" (The New Yorker) and "insight into the mind of a great photographer" (Hotshoe). A NYFA Fellow (1989), Ken Schles has work collected in more than 100 museum and library collections throughout the world.