- published: 10 Feb 2011
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Spencer Tunick (born January 1, 1967) is an American photographer best known for organizing large-scale nude shoots. Since 1994 he has photographed over 75 human installations around the world.
Spencer Tunick was born in Middletown, Orange County, New York into a Jewish family. His father Earl owned a keychain photo-viewer franchise in the Catskills. 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. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Emerson College in 1988.
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 United Nations building in midtown Manhattan, as a turning point in his career: "It all started there, moving my work from just photography into installation and performance photography," he says. Since then, he has organized and photographed over 65 temporary site-related installations in the United States and abroad.