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.
In 1992, Tunick started out 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 to small groups of nudes. These works are much more intimate images than the massive installations for which he's now known. His photos quickly became popular and he spread out to other states in America. 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 international, and has taken photos in cities that include Bruges, Buenos Aires, Buffalo, Lisbon, London, Lyon, Melbourne, Montreal, Rome, San Sebastián, São Paulo, Caracas, Newcastle/Gateshead, Vienna, Düsseldorf, Helsinki, Santiago, Mexico City and Amsterdam. In August of 1997, Tunick photographed a large group of nudes at The Great Went, a festival hosted by Phish in Limestone, Maine.
In late 2000 trip to Australia, he visited friend and Generation X pastellist James DeWeaver at his Byron Bay home. DeWeaver was one of a small group of models to take part in a return to, though briefly, the smaller, more intimate, less industrial sized groups of nudes, than those for which he is recognized today. This Tunick photo, with the reclusive DeWeaver as one of the models, can be seen at DeWeaver's website.
In June 2003, he photographed 7,000 naked people in Barcelona. On June 26, 2004, he completed his largest installation in the United States in Cleveland Ohio, 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.[1]. On September 11 2005, he shot 1,493 nudes in Lyon on the Rhône quaysides and footbridge or between containers. On March 19, 2006, Tunick photographed 1,500 nudes in Caracas, having people standing up, lying down and on their knees standing right next to the main Simon Bolivar statue.
On May 6, 2007, approximately 18,000 people posed for Tunick in Mexico City's principal square, the Zócalo, setting a new record, and almost tripling 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, also known as Plaza de la Constitución. As Tunick could only shoot from buildings located west of the square (the 3 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 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 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 temperature 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. The Aletsch glacier retreated by 100m between 2005 and 2006. He followed this installation with one at the Sagamore Hotel in Miami Beach on October 8, 2007.
Tunick is presently planning an installation to take place at Knock Shrine in County Mayo in August 2008 to coincide with the 129th anniversary of the reported apparition there of the Blessed Virgin, saints and angels. Participants will stand naked at the gable wall of the church where the apparition is said to have taken place posing as the Blessed Virgin, Saint John and St. Joseph.
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, Naked World, and Positively Naked.
His models are volunteers who receive a limited edition photo as a reward.
Biographical information from Wikipedia