NIGHT WALK – KEN SCHLES

1. Research a photo-book (select one you have looked at previously in your project) and describe what story/ narrative the book is telling – its subject-matter, genre, style, approach etc.

2. Who is the photographer? Why did he/she make it? (intentions/ reasons) Who is it for? (audience) How was it received? (any press, awards, legacy etc.)

Photographer/Author : Ken Schles

”Twenty-five years after 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 expose the frisson and striving of a life lived amongst the rubble. Here Schles embodies the flâneur as Susan 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 twenty-first century: a searching tale of wonder and desire, life and love in the dying hulk of a ruined American city.”

The book was originally published in 2014 however a second edition was published in 2016

3. Deconstruct the narrative, concept and design of the book such as:

• Book in hand: how does it feel? Smell, sniff the paper.

The book feels of a high quality, its a fairly thick book with 162 pages, smells like any other book

• Paper and ink: use of different paper/ textures/ colour or B&W or both.

White ink printed on a matte black paper

• Format, size and orientation: portraiture/ landscape/ square/ A5, A4, A3 / number of pages.

Landscape 17.3 x 23.2 cm

• Binding, soft/hard cover. image wrap/dust jacket. saddle

The book is hardback and cloth bound with a dust jacket

• Cover: linen/ card. graphic/ printed image. embossed/ debossed. letterpress/ silkscreen/hot-stamping.

The book has a black linen cover with an embossed title, covered by a dust jacket with one of the photographs from the book printed on it

• Title: literal or poetic / relevant or intriguing.

The title night walk simply describes the way in which Ken Schles has taken his photographs, as the majority of the images in the book have been taken at night out on streets and public places in Downtown New York

• Structure and architecture: how design/ repeating motifs/ or specific features develops a concept or construct a narrative.

The way in which the book has been designed so that the monochromatic images are printed on black matte paper, this gives all of the images a common aesthetic which gives the book quite a structure despite there being no obvious narrative or pattern throughout

• Design and layout: image size on pages/ single page, double-spread/ images/ grid, fold- outs/ inserts.

The design and layout of images in this book is considerably random, with some images having borders, some images being full bleed 1 page spreads and some being full 2 page spreads. There doesn’t appear to be a pattern in which this occurs

• Editing and sequencing: selection of images/ juxtaposition of photographs/ editing process.

The sequencing of photographs in the book doesn’t seem to have any sort of part to part narrative/ tell a specific story, I believe that most likely the photos are in sequence of Ken Schles’ route of walking, however I am unable to be sure of this and it definitely may not be the case

• Images and text: are they linked? Introduction/ essay/ statement by artists or others.  Use of captions (if any.)

The text at the beginning of the book is a short piece of writing from Ken Schles and the book finishes with a relevant quote by T.S. Eliot. Both of these pieces of text are linked to the photographic content of the book and help to give understanding to the purpose of the photographs used.