FUCKING NEW YORK goes to print: Kickstarter fully funded, press reactions pour in

FUCKING NEW YORK is going to print.

With three days still on the clock, the Kickstarter has cleared 200% funding. What started four years ago as a loose idea — a series of images that kept asking for more space — is now actually becoming a book.

If you’ve already backed it: thank you. You’ve helped make something real. The finished copies will ship in December 2016. This is also the last chance to pre-order at the launch price. Once the campaign ends, prices will go up — and at the rate things are moving, there might not be many copies left.

The response over the past few weeks has been louder, bigger, and more enthusiastic than I expected. Critics have connected the work to surrealist painting, dream logic, and New York's bolder instincts. Others have focused on the women at the center of the project - their control, their humor, their refusal to compromise. And Live FAST’s Vivianne Lapointe just bit her lip and said thank you. Which, to be honest, is the best reaction I could hope for.

To everyone who backed, wrote about, shared, encouraged, criticized, or stood on the street making these images with me — thank you. This project wasn't created in isolation, and it never could have been.

Some fun press quotes after the photo:

What the press is saying:

“Ecstatic, orgasmic communion with the city.”

“Fucking New York offers a thoroughly exciting, provocative and playful take on the absurd relationship between New Yorkers and their city. With a subtle sense of humor and seductive play of light and shadow, the empty streets of New York themselves become protagonists of this magnificent book.”

“Que se passe-t-il quand les villes font l’amour? Fucking New York est l’aboutissement d’une série de photos où les femmes prennent leur pied dans la ville du tout possible.”

“A striking tribute to the passion and hustle that makes the city tick.”

“We’re just as sexual as men and our desire for pleasure is just as important. Nikola Tamindzic knows this; he’s created a work of art that speaks volumes and comments on a social stigma that needs to be destroyed. The heart of the matter is that women like to fuck… and some of us like to fuck New York.”

“Millions of citizens’ throbbing lust buried under traffic lights and newsstands and coffee chains. Fucking New York has a manicness to it reminiscent of American Psycho.”

“New York is a disgusting, dirty, rude, unpleasant city, and we who live here and love it want it in us, on us, and about us. At once an epithet, an exhortation, a desire, and an active state, Fucking New York is a dizzy swirl. The Bronx is up and the Battery’s down, and the women are humping concrete all over town.”

“Every once in a while someone comes out with something that makes you bite your lip in both attraction and envy, like goddamn, thank you. This is how we feel about Nikola Tamindzic’s newest book Fucking New York.”

“Sometimes you just want to grab hold of those buildings, throw yourself at the sidewalk and ugh, ugh, ohhh. Fucking New York is about fucking New York, that powerful appreciation for whatever it is that makes you tolerate this city’s many flaws and fuck-ups, that love manifesting itself physically as a series of poised sexual abstractions. It helps that Nikola’s photos are always beautiful. He makes pressing your breasts at a window look eloquent, enchanting. Hmm. Hmmmm. Hmmmmmm.”

“Take-charge, don’t-give-a-fuck women coping a feel, licking, sucking, and writhing against fire hydrants, on police cars, with brownstone lions, along grungy sidewalks, and against filthy windows — all gorgeously shot and styled. The fucking, which plays on the city as a voyeuristic candy land, is abstract, playful, strange, beautiful, ecstatic, and occasionally downright possessed.”

“Unprecedented is the word. A dreamlike trance of celebratory sexual solidarity. A silent, organic declaration of female empowerment. As if the term ‘male gaze’ had been buried definitively in a time capsule for a 100 years, to be mocked and laughed at a century later, along with the countless galleries and magazines across America who serve up feminism as a commodity on a daily basis in order to cash in and sell product to a hyper-charged, fad-obsessed, click-bait addicted, super-sensitive swath of confused, guilt-ridden consumers.”

“Distant, architectural, slightly removed from reality, quietly sensual photographs — their flow broken up by in-your-face closeups and an occasional overtly humorous shot. The uncanny/unreal city feeling the images evoke are reminiscent of surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico’s plazas, punctuated with Lynchian humor.”

“He's certainly nabbed our curiosity.”