Categories
COMMENTS GUEST POST INVISIBLE CITY

Jn-Ulrick Desert on ‘Invisible City’, a personal reflection

The following is a personal reflection on this month’s book ‘Invisible City’ by Ken Schles. If you would like to add your own personal reflection from seeing the book for the first time. Email us mail@photobookclub.org

I have selfishly carried my copy of this wonderful book with me 3000 miles to my new home in Europe, since 10years now. I knew the work was beautiful then and i had no idea (youth) that that landscape (including the people) captured so artfully by Ken’s vision would morph or fade away- it now seems like a tsunami has hit what we all called home turf (east-village)- New York let alone the USA is indebted to Ken to have captured such a seminal period of American history so well (and i remind everyone that the book is a mere tip of the iceberg which he chose to reveal). I understand (and can see) that this book has influenced videos and films such as Pi (π) which is well worth seeing. Indeed I remember Newmath gallery and Mario and Craig Coleman and an atmosphere that I sometimes see only vaguely echoed here in Berlin (perhaps that is why i live here now- trying to re-enter Ken Schles’ Invisible City)

– Jn-Ulrick Desert

Categories
BOOKS GUEST POST INVISIBLE CITY

Ken Schles On: The Photo Book Club Process

First off I want to thank Matt and Wayne for taking on Invisible City for the Photobook Club. They didn’t have to do it. But I’m glad they have.

Photo Book Club and Ken Schles' Invisible City

The project of the Photo Book Club interests me: it’s about photography books, something I’ve been interested in and engaged in as part of my practice as a photographer for over 25 years. But there is something else that piques my interest here as well. You see, making lists of importance and photography share a common thread—one I also connect to the writing of history as well. All are activities to seek out and present hierarchies of importance. We do it all the time, in the choices we make, how we focus our attentions. When we gravitate towards something, I don’t think it’s necessarily about popularity. And even when it is, it’s almost always about something else as well. At their best, these attentions, these choices are about significance. And the question of significance interests me deeply.

©KEN SCHLES

Significance is something that this blog takes aim at and something photography targets at as well. Flusser calls photographs “significant surfaces” —they are two-dimensional surfaces that signify something. And significance is very much of importance to us humans. We are signifying creatures. It’s what we do. Maybe it is because every one of us operates from a unique and insignificant point in the universe: a deep subjectivity that we struggle to overcome through social activities. We are compelled to ‘discover’ what is significant and share our discoveries: for survival’s sake, certainly, but also for what nourishes us.

©KEN SCHLES

We can take someone else’s word for what is important or significant, which of course, we do all the time, but do those opinions have as much meaning as when we investigate and make these evaluations for ourselves? For me photography has always been about that kind of questioning. I test images against ideas, I test ideas through the work I do with photography, rather than simply accept what I am presented with. I don’t tend to let images ‘wash over’ me. I search for meaning.

And I believe that’s the project of the Photo Book Club as well. The Photo Book Club evaluates significance and relevancy, expanding our insight into the possibilities of what specific photo books can offer. That is why I am keen for this Photo Book Club process.

– Ken Schles

Categories
BOOKS INVISIBLE CITY SYNOPSIS

Synopsis: Ken Schles – ‘Invisible City’

Title

Invisible City

Author

Ken Schles

Publisher

Twelvetree Press, 1988

For a decade Ken Schles watched the passing of time from his Lower East Side Manhattan neighborhood. His camera has fixed the instances of his observations, and these moments become the foundation of his invisible city. Friends and architecture come under the scrutiny of his lens and, when sorted and viewed in the pages of this book, a remarkable achievement of personal vision emerges.

For the next month we will be looking at Invisible City with its author Ken Schles adding comment and context throughout. After you have seen the book and text using the links below, perhaps you would like to put a question to Ken?

Getting a copy of Invisible City is not easy, hence our video and text posts, but you can get your hands on Ken’s latest release ‘Oculus’ from kenschles.com or from the publisher, Noordelicht here.

Resources:

Invisible City: The Images (VIDEO)

Invisible City: The Book (VIDEO)

Invisible City: the Text

Ken Schles’ Website

Review by Guy Trebay

Review by Thomas Beller

 

 

 

Categories
BOOKS CONTEXT INVISIBLE CITY TEXT

Invisible City: The Text

As well as showing Invisible City in its entirety here, we see that the text is just as important to try and get a sense of the book and Schles’ vision. So here is the text featured in the book alongside the full video for your viewing pleasure!

Opening text:

Cities are a product of time. They are the molds in which men’s lifetimes have cooled and congealed, giving lasting shape, by way of art, to moments that would otherwise vanish with the living and leave no means of renewal or wider participation behind them. In the city, time becomes visible: buildings and monuments and public ways, more open than the written record, more subject to the gaze of many men than the scattered artifacts of the countryside, leave an imprint upon the minds even of the ignorant or the indifferent. Through the material fact of preservation, time challenges time, time clashes with time: habits and values carryover beyond the living group, streaking with different strata of time the character of any single generation. Layer upon layer, past times preserve themselves in the city until life itself is finally threatened with suffocation… Lewis Mumford The Culture of Cities


Back of the book text:

Steadily, for the past generation, a transformation has been going on in every department of thought: a re-location of interest from mechanism to organism, a change from a world in which material bodies and mechanical motion alone were real to a world in which invisible rays and emanations, in which human projections and dreams, are as real as any immediately visible or external phenomenon – as real and on occasion more important.
Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities

A man becomes confused, gradually, with the forms of his destiny; a man is, by and large, his circumstances. More than a decipherer or an avenger, more than a priest or a god, I was one imprisoned. From the tireless labyrinth of dreams I returned as if to my home to the harsh prison.. I blessed its dampness, I blessed its tiger, I blessed the crevice of light, I blessed my old suffering body, I blessed the darkness and the stone.
Borges Labyrinths

All is imaginary – family, office, friends, the street, all imaginary, far away or close at hand, the woman; the truth that lies closest, however, is only this: that you are beating your head against the wall of a windowless
and doorless cell.
Kafka Diaries (1921)

This metropolitan world then, is a world where flesh and, blood is less real than paper and ink·and celluloid. It is a world where the great masses of people, unable to have direct contact with more satisfying means of living, take life vicariously, as readers, spectators, passive observers: a world where people watch shadow-heroes and heroines in order to forget their own clumsiness or coldness in love, where they behold brutal men crushing out life in a strike riot, a wrestling ring or a military assault, while they lack the nerve even to resist the petty tyranny of their immediate boss: where they hysterically cheer the flag of their political state, and in their neighborhood, their trades union, their church, fail to perform the most elementary duties of citizenship.

Living thus, year in and year out at second hand, remote from the nature that is outside them and no Ie remote from the nature within, handicapped as lovers and as parents by the routine of the metropolis and by the constant specter of insecurity and death that hovers over its bold towers and shadowed streets living thus the mass of inhabitants remain in a state bordering on the pathological.
[Nb – The quote continues, but I did not include this part in the book, although it might be interesting to see it here:] – Ken Schles
They become the victims of phantasms, fears, obsessions, which bind them to ancestral patterns of behavior. At the very point where super-mechanization takes hold of economic production and social intercourse, a treacherous superstition, a savage irrationality, reappear in the metropolis. But these reversionary modes of behavior, though they are speedily rationalized in pseudo-philosophies, do not remain on paper: they seek an outlet. The sadistic gangster, the bestial fascist, the homicidal vigilante, the law-offending policeman burst volcanically through the crust of metropolitan life. They challenge the dream city with an even lower order of ‘reality’.
Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (p.258)

…reality itself, entirely impregnated by an aesthetic which is inseparable from its own structure, has been confused with its own image. Reality no longer has the time to take on the appearance of reality. It no longer even surpasses fiction: it captures every dream even before it takes on the appearance of a dream. Schizophrenic vertigo of these serial signs, for which no counterfeit, no sublimation is possible, immanent in their repetition – who could say what the reality is that these signs simulate?
Jean Baudrillard, Simulations

All he wanted was to hold the photograph in his fingers again, or at least to see it.
‘It exists!’ he cried.
‘No,’ said O’Brien.

He stepped across the room. There was a memory hole in the opposite wall. O’Brien lifted the grating. Unseen, the frail slip of paper was whirling away on the current of warm air; it was vanishing in a flash of flame. O’Brien turned away from the wall.
‘Ashes,’ he said. ‘Not even identifiable ashes. Dust. It does not exist. It never existed.’
‘But it did exist! It does exist! It exists in memory. I remember it. You remember it.’
‘I do not remember it,’ said O’Brien.

Winston’s heart sank. That was doublethink. He had a feeling of deadly helplessness. If he could have been certain that O’Brien was lying, it would not have seemed to matter. But it was perfectly possible that O’Brien had really forgotten the photograph. And if so, then already he would have forgotten his denial of remembering it, and forgotten the act of forgetting. How could one be sure that it was simple trickery? Perhaps that lunatic dislocation in the mind could really happen: that was the thought that defeated him.

O’Brien was looking down at him speculatively. More than ever he had the air of a teacher taking pains with a wayward but promising child.
‘There is a Party slogan dealing with the control of the past,’ he said. ‘Repeat it, if you please.’

‘”Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,”‘ repeated Winston obediently.
George Orwell, 1984

 

Categories
BOOKS COMMENTS INTERVIEW INVISIBLE CITY

Put your questions to Ken Schles on the Photo Book Club

Throughout September we will not only be looking at Invisible City, but we will be hearing from its author Ken Schles who will not only be giving us a unique insight on how the book came to be, but also answering questions from Photo Book Club readers on the book, his practice and anything else that you would love to ask one of the most important photographic minds working today.

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Pop any questions to us via the comments section above, our Facebook page, using the #photobc hashtag on Twitter, or using the form below. We will collate questions and out them to Ken in September.

If you have not seen the book, it is online in it’s entirety right here

Categories
SUMMARY

Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue: A Summary

Thanks to all who have contributed to the discussion on Eugen Richards’ ‘Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue’. We have compiled an archive of the posts below for future reference and will also be listed under the reading list page.

In June we will be looking at Larry Sultan’s ‘The Valley’

Categories
BOOKS

Eugene Richards: Books

We are coming to then end of May and ‘Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue’ by Eugene Richards, i know many have been in touch for recommendations of other books by Richards to check out. So here is a comprehensive list for you to enjoy.

Where possible, Amazon links have been provided

Links
www.eugenerichards.com

Categories
COMMENTS GUEST POST

Personal Reflection: Kate Osba on ‘Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue’

Richards’ ‘Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue’ had a big effect on photo editor Kate Osba, her personal reflection is below.
You can find Richards’ images on his site under GalleriesCocaine True, Cocaine Blue

Everyone remembers their first love; their first kiss, first rock song that sounded like its lyrics were written just for them. My first love of a photo book happened by chance (or as I have always assumed, fate) in my college library on a late weekend night. It was my second year and I was trying to get through a paper I had no interest in. Avoiding my noisy neighbors I walked around the library floor and found a corner desk with a lone book with a navy protective cover and no title. I brushed the book aside and focused on my blank screen. While inspiration refused to strike, I picked up the sticky book and opened it, thinking nothing of it. I couldn’t believe what I saw. It hit me within seconds – I was looking at something incredible. I couldn’t stop looking, carrying it around in my bag for weeks, pausing randomly throughout the day to focus on one intense page. To this day, as I sit here looking at the images that haunted me for years, I still wonder why it was this book that found me.

©EUGENE RICHARDS

Something about Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue fired me up like nothing else. This man, Eugene Richards, had gone into one of the worst neighborhoods in New York at that time, alone, and documented a world that I had never been able to see. Growing up as a middle-class white girl in Manhattan, I knew there were parts of my city I would never know. This took me somewhere I never wanted to go to, but couldn’t stop looking at. Every shot was so rough, gritty, intense. At the time I thought to be a photojournalist, one needed to travel to a far off country to document war and suffering, I had no idea it could be a subway ride away.  It’s cliche to say, but those pictures are burnt in my mind. If you asked me to name the situation in each frame today, I could do it.

©EUGENE RICHARDS

To say a plastic coated book in a 70’s style library changed my life sounds silly, but it did. The following summer I interned at Magnum, just to be a few steps closer to the eyes that saw these things. On my first day I mentioned to my boss that Eugene Richards was my favorite photographer, and never to let me see him in person because I might literally have a heart-attack. He handed me a yellow envelope and told me I needed to bring this to Gene Richard, with an address, HIS address in my sweaty hand. To say my encounter was awkward is a generous understatement. While Mr. Richards wife told me to wait a few minutes so that I could meet her husband, I immediately told her that I needed to pee and she offered her bathroom. My response was that I couldn’t handle peeing in Eugene Richards bathroom. This might be the first time his wife was ever scared of an intern. Anyway, I met him and it was fine and I managed to not pee on myself, I met him again a few months later and was less awkward – thank you, red wine.

©EUGENE RICHARDS

I still get that feeling when I see someones work that is great, that weight in my heart, unconscious smile – though nothing will ever feel like it did in that library, but that’s okay, that’s what first loves for.

Reluctantly, I threw the address away.

Kate Osba
iamthewhat@gmail.com

Categories
SYNOPSIS

Synopsis: Eugene Richards – Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue

Title
Cocaine True, Cocaine Blue

Author
Eugene Richards

Publisher
Aperture, 1994 (Hardback)
Aperture, 1994 (Paperback)


Overview

Writing in the afterword to ʻCocaine True, Cocaine Blue,ʼ Dr. Stephen W. Nicholas writes,
ʻThe United States accounts for five percent of the worldʼs population and consumes 50
percent of the worldʼs cocaine,ʼ with approximately one million American teenagers and
young adults using cocaine for the first time each year, and the rate of cocaine-associated
physical, sociological, or family-related problems doubling nationwide since 1985.

In this powerful and raw book, Eugene Richards takes an in-depth and very intimate look
at the inhabitants of three troubled communities: East New York; North Philadelphia; and
the Red Hook Housing Project in Brooklyn, New York.

Alongside the bold and often graphic black-and-white images, are Richardsʼ own personal
observations and interviews, with additional comment by journalist Edward Barnes. These
interviews, with gang members, addicts, dealers, parents, children, the elderly, sex
workers, police, and the clergy. In one such observation Richards writes, ʻThere were 107
murders, 145 rapes, 3,285 robberies, and 547 felonious assaults in East New York in one
year, in a population of 160,000… This is how we first learn about Americaʼs troubled inner-
city neighborhoods, reading the most elemental and squalid statistics, the lists of atrocities
and casualties, the body counts that are no different from those posted during war.ʼ

In ʻCocaine True, Cocaine Blueʼ Richardsʼ offers a powerful insight, and alerts us to how
drugs can affect the very fabric of our society.

– Wayne Ford