I caught this great HBO documentary last night while editing my pictures of the munchkins.
I’ve heard about photographer Spencer Tunick many times but I’ve never thought about him till now.
This documentary rattled my thinking about public nudity. Yes, in general, I think it is a bad idea, but this guy is doing special work.
If the nude is an essential form of painting, then Tunick’s work can also be considered art. It’s not erotic. It’s not porn. It’s thought provoking.
Spencer Tunick (born January 1, 1967) is an American artist. Tunick was born in Middletown, New York, USA. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Emerson College in 1988. He is best known for his installations that feature large numbers of nude people posed in artistic formations. In these images the nude form becomes abstract due to the sheer number so closely placed together. Known as installations, they are often situated in urban locations throughout the world. He also has done some "Beyond The City" woodland and beach installations and still does individuals and small groups occasionally.
"A body is a living entity. It represents life, freedom, sensuality, and it is a mechanism to carry out our thoughts. A body is always beautiful to me. It depends on the individual work and what I do with it and what kind of idea lies behind it – if age matters or not. But in my group works, the only difference is how far people can go if it rains, snows etc.” (Spencer Tunick)
In 1986, he visited London, where he took photographs of a nude at a bus stop and of scores of nudes in Alleyn’s School’s Lower School Hall in Dulwich, Southwark.
On August 18 2007, Tunick used hundreds of naked people in a "living sculpture" on the Aletsch Glacier in an art installation intended to draw attention to global warming and the shrinking of the world’s glaciers. The termperature was about 10 °C at the time of the time of the installation. The 600 participants on the shrinking glacier volunteered for Tunick, in a collaboration with Greenpeace, to let the world know about the effects of global warming on the melting of Swiss glaciers.[5] The Aletsch glacier retreated by 100m between 2005 and 2006.[6] He followed this installation with one at the Sagamore Hotel in Miami Beach on October 8, 2007. [7]
Since 1992, Tunick has been arrested five times while working outdoors in New York. In each case, the charges against him were dropped shortly thereafter.
Tunick is the subject of three HBO documentaries, Naked States[8], Naked World[9], and Positively Naked[10].
His models are volunteers who receive a limited edition photo as a reward.
