Invisible City

Invisible City is Ken Schles's photobook of life in New York's Lower East Side and East Village in the 1980s, first published in 1988 and reissued by Steidl from scans of the original negatives.

Twelvetrees Press of Pasadena published the first edition. Steidl's edition, published in 2014, is printed in quadratone. It runs to 80 pages with 62 photographs, set against texts by Lewis Mumford, Jorge Luis Borges, Franz Kafka, George Orwell and Jean Baudrillard, and Schles designed it with Jack Woody. Adam Bell, reviewing the reissue in the Brooklyn Rail, describes 35mm black-and-white pictures of friends, lovers, garbage-strewn streets and burning buildings.

Schles was born in 1960 and studied at Cooper Union and with Lisette Model at the New School. In the 1980s he lived in an East Village tenement that became abandoned, organized his fellow tenants and led the fight to prosecute the landlord, which ended in a jail sentence for the landlord and the building's renovation. The 1988 book was named a New York Times notable book of the year, and the reissue was named a TIME photobook of the year. Schles's site lists four histories of the photobook that cite it, including Parr and Badger's. With Night Walk, it was nominated for the 2016 Deutsche Börse Prize.