A gritty portrayal of the 1980s Lower East Side
- Text by Shelley Jones
- Photography by Ken Schles
Long before Taylor was the ambassador of the big apple and she welcomed us all to New York to reinvent ourselves, America’s premier city was a bit of a mad land (don’t believe me? Just check out these testimonials on Quora).
Poverty, drugs and crime were kinda big and the streets were kind of gnarly. But New York was photographer Ken Schles’ muse. Born in Brooklyn in 1960, Ken moved into an apartment on Avenue B in the East Village in 1983 and began shooting his surroundings.
“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,” says the Howard Greenberg Gallery, who are presenting his current exhibition Night Walk. “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 neighbourhood.”
In 1988 Ken published what would become a cult classic book of photography called Invisible City. Now, twenty-five years later, that book is being reissued with a brand new companion book Night Walk, culled from work in his archive and described as “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”.
Enjoyed this article? Like Huck on Facebook or follow us on Twitter.
You might like
A stark, confronting window into the global cocaine trade
Sangre Blanca — Mads Nissen’s new book is a close-up look at various stages of the drug’s journey, from production to consumption, and the violence that follows wherever it goes.
Written by: Isaac Muk
“Like skating an amphitheatre”: 50 years of the South Bank skatepark, in photos
Skate 50 — A new exhibition celebrates half a century of British skateboarding’s spiritual centre. Noah Petersons traces the Undercroft’s history and enduring presence as one of the world’s most iconic spots.
Written by: Noah Petersons
“I didn’t care if I got sacked”: Sleazenation’s Scott King in conversation with Radge’s Meg McWilliams
Radgenation — For our 20th Anniversary Issue, Huck’s editor Josh Jones sits down with the legendary art director and the founder of a new magazine from England’s northeast to talk about taking risks, crafting singular covers and disrupting the middle class dominance of the creative industries.
Written by: Josh Jones
Free-spirited, otherworldly portraits of Mexico City’s queer youth
Birds — Pieter Henket’s new collaborative photobook creates a stage for CDMX’s LGBTQ+ community to express themselves without limitations, styling themselves with wild outfits that subvert gender and tradition.
Written by: Isaac Muk
The suave style and subtle codes of gay San Francisco in the ’70s
Seminal Works — Hal Fischer’s new photobook explores the photographer’s archive, in which he documented the street fashion and culture of the city post-Gay Liberation, and pre-AIDS pandemic.
Written by: Miss Rosen
The stripped, DIY experimentalism of SHOOT zine
Zine Scene — Conceived by photographer Paul Mpagi Sepuya in the ’00s, the publication’s photos injected vulnerability into gay portraiture, and provided a window into the characters of the Brooklyn arts scene. A new photobook collates work made across its seven issues.
Written by: Miss Rosen
