In the late 1960s and early 1970s, New York’s Chelsea Hotel was one of the most famous hotels in the world. Its residents at one time or another were among the leading cultural figures of the time, from Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe and Wim Wenders to Milos Forman, Arthur Miller, Janis Joplin and Arthur C. Clarke.

?From 1969 to 1971, the German artist Albert Scopin also lived there. A photographer’s assistant, as discreetly as possible he captured the hotel’s the lively goings-on, from the Warhol crowd performing a play to the hotel staff throwing a crazy party in the basement, often not even looking through the viewfinder of his Kodak Instamatic. Lost for decades (Scopin sent them to a Berlin magazine, where they promptly disappeared before being found by a gallerist), the resulting images reveal a vanished New York