Release Date: April 2010, Field's Publishing

The Forward by Pulitzer Prize Winner for The Hours, Michael Cunningham:

New York City tells at least a thousand and one stories about itself. We’ve heard most of them, over and over again. It’s the City That Doesn’t Sleep. It is, by its own reckoning, the Center of the Known Universe. It’s brawny and brawling and brutally frank; it’s the marketplace of the world; it’s where a Wall Street titan may live next door to a rock star. And we know that in New York it’s possible to make a living by calling yourself the Naked Cowboy, strolling around Times Square in your underwear with a guitar strung over your shoulders, and charging tourists to have their pictures taken with you. That fact alone sets it apart from any other city.

Of all these stories, however—all these proclivities and eccentricities and points of (sometimes debatable) pride—New York hardly ever talks anymore about its own beauty. It has not always been so. Remember Bernice Abbott’s delirious black and white photographs? Remember Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie?” Remember the New York of Woody Allen’s “Manhattan?”

The New York we love (and sometimes hate) today is a big sexy beast, but it is rarely if ever lauded as a beauty. In New York Love Affair, Barbara Cohen’s ardent, earnest, unabashedly lovely depictions of the city go a long way toward reviving New York’s sense of its own comeliness.

Right now, in the early part of the 21st century, it’s a rare artist who doesn’t shrink from beauty altogether or, at the very least, cloak it in irony. If most serious living artists balk at verdant land- scapes or laudatory portraits, you could count on one hand the number who are eager to wander anywhere close to a romantic, thriving New York.

Sometimes the bolder experiments are the ones that don’t look like experiments at all. What Cohen offers with this collection of altered photographs is a more radical gesture than it may at first appear to be. She’s insisting on New York City as a dowager queen, no longer young but all the more splendid for marching erect, in full regalia, into middle age. Cohen’s New York is simultaneously her own and a revival of a past city—or, more accurately, a revival of a past perception of a city—that glows, that shimmers, that holds within itself dazzling brightnesses and deep, deep darks. Cohen’s pictures, and the city they depict, are significant beauties.

—Michael Cunningham, author of Pulitzer Prize Winner The Hours, A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood and Specimen Days.