Public Nudity Is Always More Fun With Friends

Spencer Tunick has been taking pictures of nudes in London, since 1986.  In that time, he has traveled to over 20 cities worldwide to organize shoots.  As his popularity grew, so did the number of subjects in each photo.  In 2003, Tunick set a record for the most nudes in one photo; 7000+ in Barcelona.  Last Sunday, he shattered his own recored in Mexico City’s Zócalo plaza with at least 18,000 participants in attendance.

LA Times Reports:

"People usually strip for love or money. But Isaac Esquivel and
thousands of other Mexican men and women dropped their clothes in neat
piles early Sunday and pranced naked around the main plaza of this
capital just for the heck of it.

New York photographer Spencer Tunick, famous for rounding up people to
pose naked in cities around the world, brought his fetching artistic
gimmick here. His goal was to persuade more than 7,000 residents of
this very Roman Catholic country to
disrobe in front of God, one
another and a media army perched on the roof of the downtown Holiday
Inn. City officials estimated as many as 20,000 people might have taken
part."

Goes to show fashion statements don’t have to have anything to do with clothes.  I love the imagery here; mass nudity juxtaposed with iconic representation of religious condemnation of such.  Inspired? Feel free to volunteer on Tunick’s site for a guaranteed amazing experience.  This form of art, guerilla style exposes of raw humanity, bonds participants in a unique way.

"Shortly after 8 a.m., Tunick dismissed all the men — about
three-quarters of the crowd — and broke the spell that for a couple of
hours had united several thousand strangers in an odd intimacy."

From this point of view, humanity becomes a dense, homogeneous, enveloping blanket; the moment  shatters the cold, alienating nature of urban living by briefly altering people’s proximity to one another and removing all possible material boundaries.  Bricks and concrete are often the only things separating thousands of nudes in any given city at any given time; props to Tunick for shifting perspectives to capture just how similar we all are, further proving how autonomous and powerful a group of like minded and accepting people can be. 
 

*photos: Claudio Cruz / AP