The Stephen Cohen Gallery is pleased to announce Nocturnal, Gerald Förster's color photographs and videos of intimate, sexually charged, urban scenes at night. At first glance, Förster's dark images of seemingly random locales offer a sense of noir-like drama – a staged setting. Upon closer inspection however, a naked couple is revealed, their blurred shapes presume an act of lovemaking, captured forever on film. Whether intrigued or repulsed, questions fill the mind. Is this real? Staged or fleetingly captured? Nocturnal presents the viewer not only with beautiful, moody images, but which also addresses, an issue that is continuously up for discussion – sex, and all of its attributes from a simple physical need to lustful desire. Förster, a German native now living in New York, began the series in 2004 as a response to what he views as the taboo-based repression of American sexual culture. He solicited colleagues and friends, as well as the public through various Internet sites to find people willing to be part of his project. His subjects range in age from 18 to 65, and come from diverse ethnic backgrounds. Förster photographed Nocturnal using an 8 x 10 inch film camera, completing the series in 2007. He says of the work, “Each p hotograph...is an elaborately constructed visual metaphor for the beauties and mysteries elicited in the open transgression of social taboo... each exemplifies the exhilaration of liberated sexuality in a lost, isolated world.” Gerald Förster was born in 1964 in Bad Oeynhausen, Germany. He attended the School of Photography in Bielefeld, Germany. His work has been widely exhibited in Europe and the U.S., including at The Center of Photography in Woodstock, NY. Förster received the 2005 Euro Press Award in Germany for Nocturnal. He was awarded the 2006 Fujifilm Euro Professional Photo prize, as well as the 2003 World in Focus Award for his LightYears project.