Early work
Tunick was born in the United States in Middletown, Orange County, New York.
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 on small groups of nudes. These works are much more intimate images than the massive installations for which he is now known. By 1994 Tunick had organized and photographed over 65 temporary site related installations in the United States and abroad. Since then, he has taken his celebration of the nude form internationally, and has taken photos in cities that include Cork, Dublin, Bruges, Buenos Aires, Buffalo, Lisbon, London, Lyon, Melbourne, Montreal, Rome, San Sebastián, São Paulo, Caracas, Newcastle/Gateshead, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Helsinki, Santiago, Mexico City, Sydney and Amsterdam. In August 1997, Tunick photographed a large group of nudes at The Great Went, a festival hosted by Phish in Limestone, Maine.
Major installations
In June 2003, Tunick photographed 7,000 naked people in Barcelona. On June 26, 2004 in Cleveland, Ohio, 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.[4] On September 11, 2005, he shot 1,493 nudes in Lyon on the Rhône quaysides and footbridge resp. between containers.[5] On March 19, 2006, Tunick photographed 1,500 nudes in Caracas, having people standing up, lying down, and on their knees beside the main Simon Bolivar statue.[6]
On May 6, 2007, approximately 18,000 people posed for Tunick in Mexico City's principal square, the Zócalo, setting a new record,[7] 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.
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 realized an installation in a tulip field in Schermerhorn. On June 3, 2007, he made installations with 2000 participants in Amsterdam. Tunick's first installation with 2000 people was in a car park; the following installations were with 250 men at a nearby gas station and 250 women on bicycles on the Lijnbaansgracht - Lauriergracht. Tunick's final installation was made with a small selected group of participants on a canal called Leliegracht. For this installation a special bridge construction was made to create the illusion that the people were floating over the water.
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. The temperature was about 10°C.[8] The Aletsch glacier retreated by 100 m between 2005 and 2006.[9] He followed this installation with one at the Sagamore Hotel in Miami Beach on October 8, 2007.[10]
Tunick announced plans to take photographs in Ernst Happel Stadium in Vienna with 2,008 naked soccer fans in the run-up to the Euro 2008 tournament.[11] Only about 1860 volunteers showed up for the photoshoot on May 11, 2008.[12]
On June 17, 2008 Tunick carried out an installation in the grounds of Blarney Castle in County Cork with about 1200 people. Another photoshoot was organised for four days later (Saturday June 21) in Dublin, on the South Wall near the Poolbeg Lighthouse, with over 2500 nude people taking part. The South Wall event was somewhat washed out, with one of the proposed set-ups having to be cancelled. However, people praised the organisers for an event well run.
On October 3, 2009 Tunick performed another installation in collaboration with Greenpeace, this time to draw attention to the effect climate change is having on French wine production. Over 700 volunteers turned up at a vineyard near Macon, France for a number of poses among the vines.
On March 1st, 2010 Tunick carried out a series of installations titled "The Base" on the Sydney Opera House Forecourt and inside the Opera House. The installations were carried out as part of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras and were Tunick's first large-scale installation in Sydney, with over 5,200 participants.[13][14][15]
Quotes
"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
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