Embrace

In the 1980s Ken Schles was living in an abandoned tenement in New York’s East Village, documenting his life in the underground art and club scene. The images he made of the neighborhood’s architecture and denizens reveal a gritty, raw, and mesmerizing existence during a turbulent time. In 1988 Schles published the images in Invisible City, a book that soon became a cult classic. The grainy, often blurred photographs rich with deep blacks suggest impressions rather than facts, as in this embrace born of tenderness or desperation.