Tunick, Spencer

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Tunick, Spencer

Photographer

B orn January 1, 1967, in Middletown, NY; son of a hotel photographer. Education: Emerson College, B.A., 1988; attended the International Center for Photography.

Addresses: Home—New York, NY. Office—c/o I-20 Gallery, 557 W. 23rd St., New York, NY 10011.

Career

M usic photographer for Paper magazine, 1990s; began photographing nude figures in New York City, 1992; solo gallery exhibitions hosted by Thicket, New York City, 1995; cross-country project profiled in the documentary Naked States, 2000; launched “Nude Adrift” project, 2001, which was chronicled in the 2003 documentary Naked World.

Sidelights

S pencer Tunick is a photographer and artist who works in a unique medium: large-scale nude “sculptures,” which he assembles with the help of dozens, or even thousands, of live participants. When he began taking such photographs in the early 1990s, Tunick often faced arrest, but as his reputation and artistic credibility have grown over the years the harassment has abated. His subjects receive no payment for their participation except for a signed photo of the final image. Though shedding one’s clothes in front of hundreds of strangers for a photograph has a somewhat mischievous air about it, Tunick theorizes that “for some of the participants, it’s disappointingly not as erotic as they would like it to be. I work fast and you are naked for short amounts of time,” he explained to Sharon Krum in the Times of London.

Tunick was born on the first day of 1967 in Middletown, New York. He grew up in the nearby town of South Fallsburg as the son of a hotel photographer; his grandfather and great-grandfather were also in the business, having worked as photojournalists earlier in the century. At Emerson College in Boston, however, Tunick majored in film and speech, and did not take up the camera in earnest until living in New York City in the early 1990s. While working as a photographer for the New York City magazine Paper, he began photographing nudes on the street in 1992. “My first was a woman crouching in the street holding a live white rat,” he recalled in an interview with Joyce Wadler of the New York Times. “I attached an African root—a big long root that looks like a giant tail—to her back and strung it across Third Street . I also did a naked woman holding a swordfish. Then I couldn’t afford the props.”

Tunick’s friends began clamoring to be furtively photographed in and around New York City, and one of his first full-scale pieces came when he gathered several dozen people to strip at the United Na- tions Plaza in Manhattan later in 1992. His work began gaining fame in countercultural circles, and he signed on with a gallery. Reviewing a 1995 exhibition of Tunick’s work at Thicket in New York City, Art in America critic Richard Vine asserted that Tu-nick “clearly has an exceptional eye and a compelling sense of implicit drama . Even in group shots, the tension lies not so much in the interrelationships of the participants as in the isolation of each figure within the surrealistically impersonal environs.”

Tunick and his mission also gained some press because New York City police habitually arrested him, which began in December of 1994 at Rockefeller Plaza when he staged a shot of a naked man draped over one of the Plaza’s enormous Christmas bulbs. The criminal charges varied in each, but usually involved misdemeanor violations for unlawful assembly, disorderly conduct, and reckless endangerment. Finally, Tunick took the city to court, claiming that his works were protected under the First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause. A higher court agreed that his civil rights had been violated— tellingly, police rarely arrested the naked people, only Tunick—and that decision was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case.

Tunick’s reputation was further boosted by a 2000 documentary film, Naked States, that chronicled his quest to photograph people in each of the 50 American states. A year later, he launched his “Nude Adrift” project, which was aimed at taking photographs on every continent. More and more bodies began turning up in each of Tunick’s increasingly orchestrated shoots, often staged at well-known landmarks. His subjects were recruited via newspaper ads or flyers handed out on the streets of major cities. There was usually an even split of genders in each, and Tunick soon became skilled in sensing which of the interested strangers would show up at the appointed, often pre-dawn hour for the photo shoot. “When I hand out flyers inviting people to participate I don’t give them to women who wear gold jewellery or pearls, or men who wear business suits,” he told Krum, the Times of London journalist. “You know that they don’t take risks with their bodies. Once I handed a flyer to a guy in a serious suit and he marched right over to a policeman and gave it to him.”

Tunick set a new record in Barcelona, Spain, in 2003 with 7,000 participants, and a new documentary film, Naked World, chronicled similar shoots in Melbourne, Australia; Cape Town, South Africa; São Paulo, Brazil; and Tokyo, Japan. A year later, Tunick assembled 2,754 people in Cleveland, Ohio, which surpassed his previous North American record of 2,500 disrobed citizens of Montreal, Canada. Rivers featured prominently in some memorable images from Tunick’s camera in 2005, with roughly 2,000 subjects turning up for a shoot on the River Tyne quays of Newcastle, England in July of 2005, and 1,493 people lining up across the Rhone River in Lyon, France two months later. In May of 2007, Tu-nick set a new record with an estimated 18,000 naked bodies assembled at Mexico City’s famous Constitution Plaza.

In the second decade of his career, Tunick has gained some artistic clout, with his immense photographs often commissioned or sponsored by legitimate museums and arts foundations. The Cleveland shoot, for example, was done under the aegis of the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2007, the Dream Amsterdam Foundation in the Netherlands commissioned several works as part of an annual performance-art project in and around the famously liberal Dutch city. Later that summer, Tunick traveled to Switzerland at the behest of Greenpeace to photograph participants on an Alpine glacier to call attention to global warming.

Tunick also prefers to stage his photo shoots at dawn, in part because of the ideal light it affords, and also because “people are less confrontational, less violent in the morning,” he told a writer for London’s Independent, Maggie O’Farrell. Early in his career, the small number of people who appeared in his works were often young and had impressive physiques, but as Tunick’s reputation grew a more diverse array of participants became part of his projects. “When people pose I think it heightens their awareness of their own bodies,” he told Krum in the Times of London profile, “how precious life is, and how connected you really are to your neighbor.”