(January, 1, 1967, Middletown, Orange County (New York) )

Spencer Tunick is a controversial American photographer of Jewish origin whose specialty is photographing masses of naked people in an artistic disposition. He earned a Science degree from Emerson College in 1988 and has toured Europe and the Americas for his performing arts.

Tunick was born in the United States in Middletown in New York’s Orange County to a Jewish family. In 1986, he traveled to London where he took pictures of nudes at a bus stop at the piles of nudes at Alleyn’s School in the Lower Hall in Dulwich, Southwark Township. He subsequently obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Emerson College in 1988.

During the festival ‘Intramurs’ (entremuros) he revealed the result of the action that the American photographer carried out in Valéncia, Spain with the motto ‘Pell del Mediterrani (Skin of the Mediterranean)’. In addition, the contest delivered the photograph to the 1,300 people who participated in this artistic initiative at a party that was held at Galería Princesa 2.0 in the capital of Turia.

Characteristics of his art

He is well known for his photographs of large masses of naked people arranged in artistic formations often located in urban locations and known as Installations. From these images arise a series of tensions to the observer between the concepts of: the public and the private, the tolerated and the forbidden, moral and immoral or individual and collective.

Tunick started in 1992 photographing naked people on the streets of New York. His photos quickly became popular and he decided to expand his work to other states in North America, in his project called Naked States. Later he made an international tour, which he called Nude Adrift (Nude Drifting) taking photographs of cities such as: Bruges, London, Lyon, Melbourne, Montreal, Caracas, Santiago, 1 Mexico, São Paulo, Newcastle or Vienna.

He was arrested in 1994 with a female model when she posed nude at the Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, New York [citation needed]. In June 2003, he photographed 7000 naked people in Barcelona. In May 2007, in Mexico City he broke his own record, managing to gather in the Plaza de la Constitución (Zócalo) of this city about 19,000 participants who undressed without prejudice.3 Their models are volunteers who only receive a signed photo. for their collaboration.

Controversy

In many of the places where Tunick has carried out his artistic project, a debate has arisen over whether these installations are really an art or not. Various groups describe these acts as mere social manifestations, in support of freedom of expression. In Chile, for example, he photographed some 5,000 naked people in the heart of Santiago, Chile, at an ambient temperature below 6ºC. The moralistic debate around the photographer’s work lasted almost 4 months.