Fucking New York

FUCKING NEW YORK interrogates the body in the city — visibility, power, and their contradictions. Its roots lie in archaic and contemporary myth — from the elemental erotic charge of Balkan fertility rites to Sex and the City’s New York-as-lover capricious, consuming, and impossible to leave. The project emerges from two highly aestheticized photographic traditions: fashion and erotic photography. It both inherits and rejects their conventions, subverting the polished surfaces and calculated desire that define these genres. Where fashion photography constructs an image to be consumed, and erotic photography manufactures a gaze to be satisfied, FUCKING NEW YORK dismantles the structures that dictate who is seen, how, and for whom. The city is neither backdrop nor metaphor but an active participant — a force that shapes and is shaped by those who move through it.

At the center of the project is a question of agency. For centuries, the visual history of the female body has been shaped by the imperative to please, to seduce, or to reassure. FUCKING NEW YORK upends this expectation. The women in these images do not solicit the viewer’s gaze; they inhabit their bodies with an unselfconscious presence that refuses interpretation. They do not perform eroticism — they assert it. The lens, often an accomplice in voyeurism, is here rendered neutral: key images were made from far enough away that the subject could not locate the camera. This deliberate absence of proximity reduced performative tension and reframed the act as one of self-possession, not display.
New York, famously indifferent to those who love it, is an object of relentless desire, a presence that takes more than it gives. FUCKING NEW YORK reverses this equation, reimagining the city not as something that extracts but as something that is claimed. The images shift between a distant, architectural scale — rendering the subject almost imperceptible within the vastness of the built environment — and moments of proximity so direct they are nearly confrontational. If there is a surrealism to this vision, it is not in the sense of a dream but in the way it exposes a reality that is always present yet rarely acknowledged.
The work, though originally conceived as mixed-gender, ultimately cohered around women (see Notes on Method). Men, who in the history of the gaze have always been its privileged holders, find themselves relegated to the margins — passive observers, looking out from windows, present but powerless. The women do not acknowledge them. Their actions clear the space of voyeurism, negating the structures that typically determine who gets to look and who must be seen. In this, FUCKING NEW YORK makes a radical claim: that vulnerability, when freely chosen, is not a state of exposure but an act of possession. It is not about being seen – it is about seeing oneself, fully, in a city that gives nothing and demands everything in return.
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