Spencer Tunick

Spencer Tunick (born January 1, 1967) is an American photographer best known for organizing large-scale nude shoots.

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.

He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Emerson College in 1988.

In 1992, Tunick began documenting live nudes in public locations in New York through video and photographs.

His early works from this period focus more on a single nude individual or small groups of nudes.

Since 1994, he has photographed over 75 human installations around the world.

Spencer Tunick was born in Middletown, Orange County, New York into a Jewish family.

His father Earl owned a keychain photo-viewer franchise in the Catskills.

Tunick cites 1994, when he posed and photographed 28 nude people in front of the headquarters of the United Nations in midtown Manhattan, as a turning point in his career; "It all started there, moving my work from just photography into installation and performance photography," he says.

Since then, he has organized and photographed over 65 temporary site-related installations in the United States and abroad.

Tunick's philosophy is that "individuals en masse, without their clothing, grouped together, metamorphose into a new shape. The bodies extend into and upon the landscape like a substance. These grouped masses which do not underscore sexuality become abstractions that challenge or reconfigure one's views of nudity and privacy."

Sometimes, after gathering his subjects together, Tunick grades them by gender, long hair, age or other characteristics.

Registration for modeling on his website includes questions about skin tone.

A color chart shows seven boxes ranging from stark white to baby-powder pink and dark chocolate.

In his work, he plays off different flesh tones or groups people of the same color.

Tunick is also interested in the juxtaposition between the organic and the mechanical, and often chooses famous buildings or unusual structures as his backdrop.

Tunick is the star of forthcoming pandemic documentary film Stay Apart Together, directed by Nicole Vanden Broeck, in which Tunick reinvents his photography "to find a way to bring everyone together while staying apart".

To mark International Women's Day on March 8, 2021, the twenty-fourth session of the Stay Apart Together project saw Tunick and Vanden Broeck collaborate with Mexican-American visual artist Daniela Edburg to depict 75 Latin American women in 11 poses, incorporating the colors purple and green (symbols of the Latin American feminist movement) and hot pink, selected by Edburg for its liveliness.

On May 26, 2001, between 2,500 and 3,000 volunteers gathered at the Place des Arts in Montreal, in collaboration with the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.

Later, in September 2001, Tunick photographed 400 nude volunteers in Greenwich, London, each side of Cutty Sark, and then in a nearby street.

On June 30, 2002, 4,000 volunteers got together near the Parque Forestal in Santiago completely naked at 0°.

Some people from conservative and Christian background criticized the event and even protested in front of the Palacio de La Moneda after it happened, gathering around 200 people.

In April 2003, Tunick was again in London to photograph 160 nude volunteers in front of the Saatchi Gallery at its opening on the South Bank, and later 500 volunteers in a nude photo shoot in Selfridges department store.

In June, he photographed 7,000 naked people in Barcelona, and hundreds of women in New York's Grand Central Terminal in October.

On June 26, 2004 in Cleveland, he completed his largest installation in the United States, with 2,754 people posing.

In August 2004, a photo shoot was completed in Buffalo of about 1,800 nudes in Buffalo's old central train station.

On July 17, 2005 he photographed almost 1,700 nudes on the quaysides at Newcastle upon Tyne and Gateshead, including the Gateshead Millennium Bridge.

On September 11, 2005, he photographed 1,493 nudes in Lyon on the Rhône quaysides and footbridge resp.

between containers.

On March 19, 2006, Tunick photographed 1,500 nudes in Caracas, having people standing up, lying down, and on their knees beside the main Simón Bolívar statue.

On August 6, 2006 he photographed about 500 nudes in the courtyard of the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf.

In 2007 Spencer Tunick was commissioned by the Dream Amsterdam Foundation to realize art projects for the artistic event Dream Amsterdam.

On April 15, 2007, Tunick organized an installation in a tulip field in Schermerhorn.

On June 3, 2007, he photographed installations with 2000 participants in Amsterdam: 2000 people in a car park; 250 men at a nearby gas station; and 250 women on bicycles on the Lijnbaansgracht — Lauriergracht.

A small group of participants was photographed on a canal, Leliegracht, requiring a special bridge construction to create the illusion that the people were floating over the water.

On May 6, 2007, approximately 18,000 people posed for Tunick in Mexico City's principal square, the Zócalo, setting a new record, and more than doubling the previous highest number of 7,000 people who had turned out in Barcelona in 2003.

Male and female volunteers of different ages stood and saluted, lay down on the ground, crouched in the fetal position, and otherwise posed for Tunick's lens in the city's massive central plaza, the Plaza de la Constitución.

Here, the specific problems of photographing great numbers of people outside became clear: as Tunick could only shoot from buildings located west of the square (the three other sides of the square are government buildings and the cathedral), there was a rush to take the pictures before dawn to avoid getting sunflare in the lens.

An accompanying documentary Naked in Mexico: Spencer Tunick was also filmed on, and around, the date of the photo shoot.

On August 18, 2007, Tunick used 600 nude people in a "living sculpture" on the Aletsch Glacier in an installation intended to draw attention to global warming and the shrinking of the world's glaciers in a collaboration with Greenpeace.