Spencer Tunick stripped hundreds of willing participants naked over the weekend for a new photography installation shot in Austria. The American photographer, who has taken nude to a whole new level, snapped photos of 1,800 disrobed subjects in an Austrian soccer stadium that will play host to this year’s 2008 Euro Cup Finals. Tunick arranged the subjects throughout areas of the stands, having been prohibited from using the grass playing field due to official’s concerns about wear and tear. According to the photographer’s website:

“This very special ephemeral installation that we are inviting you to be part of is devised to capture and combine the spirit of sports, the grand sweeping waves of stadium architecture and the abstract relation of the human form to modern structures,”

It is indeed one of this writer’s great regrets to have not taken an invitation to appear in Tunick’s 1997 installation in Times Square, NYC seen above. At the time the photographer’s works were much more guerilla-style affairs, which involved the invitees showing up in robes at 5AM at the selected location, and quickly stripping and running out into the street for the shots like a (literal) flash mob. Since then both Tunick’s fame and the scale of his work has grown immensely, to the point where his 2007 Mexico City - Zocalo, MUCA/UNAM Campus installations (shown below) included upwards of 18,000 subjects.

You can by learning more about the work of Greenpeace, with whom Spencer Tunick recently teamed up with to draw more attention to the enormous problem of global warming. For the project the artist posed 600 subjects nude for shots on the fast disappearing Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland, as seen below.

LINKS:

Reuters: Hundreds Strip Naked in Vienna for Artist Tunick

Earth Times: Artist Spencer Tunick Seeks Nude Crowd in Ireland

Greenpeace: 600 Strip Naked on Glacier in Global Warming Protest