Spencer Tunick facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Spencer Tunick
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Middletown, New York, U.S.
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| Known for | Photography |
Spencer Tunick is an American photographer.
Early life and education
Spencer Tunick was born in Middletown, Orange County, New York into a Jewish family, being the fourth generation of photographers. His grandfather was a photographer of high profile politicians in the United Nations. His father, Earle David Tunick, founded Resort Photo Service, a photography business that photographed private events as well as those of famous politicians, singers, actors, and athletes. His paternal grandmother is a relative of Martin Indyk, the former US ambassador to Israel.
Tunick studied at the New York Military Academy, and later earned a degree in Fine Arts from Emerson College in 1988.
Photography
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. 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. Between 1994 and 2011, he photographed over 75 human installations around the world.
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.
Since 1992, Tunick has traveled the world, capturing both individuals and groups. In 1994, he produced 75 distinct photographs. In Sydney, Australia, 5,200 volunteer Australians posed in 2010, and at the Dead Sea in Israel in 2011, around 1,200 participants paid to join the installation.
The many volunteers who participate come from diverse societal groups, and by shedding their clothes, they become a single homogeneous entity. This collective body becomes a living environmental sculpture.
To mark International Women's Day on March 8, 2021, the 24th 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.
Documentaries
Tunick is the subject of three HBO documentaries.
He is the also subject of the COVID-19 pandemic documentary film Stay Apart Together, directed by Nicole Vanden Broeck and released in 2023, in which Tunick reinvents his photography "to find a way to bring everyone together while staying apart".
See also
In Spanish: Spencer Tunick para niños
