Spencer Tunick: Group Photography in the Time of Isolation

Spencer Tunick, Stay Apart Together, 2020
 

By DANIEL MAIDMAN June, 2020 

For many years, photographer Spencer Tunick has coordinated massive happenings. Hundreds or thousands of nude participants gather in striking public spaces and arrange themselves, under his direction, into orderly configurations, which respond to the space. As I’ve written here before [link: https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/s-social-media-censorship-blues/4104], his work balances on a knife edge where a celebration of shared humanity opposes a reduction of the human animal to meat-like anonymity. 

What’s the man to do when an unholy mix of pandemic and public policy prevent public gatherings altogether?

Tunick is always stubborn and never less than inventive. So, like the rest of us, he has rolled over to video conferencing. He started by coordinating groups of volunteers to replicate simple nude poses in their homes. Under this new pictorial paradigm, the participants’ variety of shapes and colors and living spaces celebrates the shared humanity he always seeks. Conversely, he also evokes his uneasy reduction of humanity to meat. He uses the grid of the conferencing software to digitally recreate the crowd; each figure occupies too few pixels for true clarity. And he has his participants wear their facemasks, foregrounding the de-individualizing quality of this 2020 equivalent of taking your shoes off at the airport.
 

Stay Apart Together, Spencer Tunick, 2020
 

Tunick has a less well-known but equally dedicated history of shooting individuals and very small groups of people. He continues that project in the present conditions.
 

Mexico | France, Stay Apart Together, Spencer Tunick, 2020

In this second body of work, Tunick zeroes in on the pain of solitude at a much more personal level. He positions couples on either side of a wide frame, touching at the center of the composition. That center is the vertical line of the split screen – though the couples are pictorially together, they are physically separate, joined only through the massless medium of the videoconference.
 

California | South Carolina, Stay Apart Together, Spencer Tunick, 2020
 

To my eye, when he reduces his figures to a number, which maps to ordinary relationships we can understand, his images take on an empathy impossible at a crowd scale. These are poignant scenes of longing and frustration, union and separation, which will be recognizable, one way or another, to everyone who has passed through the present interval. Which is to say, to everyone. WM
 

Germany | Mexico, Stay Apart Together, Spencer Tunick, 2020
 

Tunick’s current work is included in “LIFE DURING WARTIME: ART IN THE AGE OF CORONAVIRUS,” USF Contemporary Art Museum’s first major virtual art exhibition, opening June 6.

https://lifeduringwartimeexhibition.org

For more of Tunick’s work:

https://www.instagram.com/spencertunick

https://lifeduringwartimeexhibition.org/spencer-tunick