Mexico City – Fifteen years after he photographed some 18,000 naked people in Mexico City’s Zócalo, New York photographer Spencer Tunick, known internationally for his large-scale nude shoots, returned virtually to the capital city this week to conclude his pandemic project, “Stay Apart Together”.
The aim of the Mexico City shoot, and the “Stay Apart Together” project of which it is part, is to document human response to the coronavirus pandemic, including people’s capacity to adapt to new experiences such as enforced isolation. The project, which started in 2020, consisted of some 50 photography virtual sessions with participants joining the shoots from their own homes in locations around the world.
For this week’s shot, Tunick chose 50 people to come together and pose naked with their laptops in front of the Ministry of the Interior building in the Historic Center of Mexico City. The 55-year-old photographer directed the two-day shoot via Zoom from his home in New York state. Alonso Gorozpe, a creative producer, coordinated the project on the ground in Mexico City.
According to La Jornada, one of the most striking scenes directed by Tunick from his New York state home involved the participants running out of the cultural center with open laptops in their hands. They removed their face masks in an “act of liberation” as they exited into the open air, the newspaper said.
“This last session is one more exploration that we do as a response to the pandemic and as part of the search to continue creating experiences today. The session will be documented and will be part of the documentary that Nicole Vanden Broeck is directing,” Tunick said.
Regarding the documentary, Alonso Gorozpe pointed out that it will contain images of different moments of Stay Apart Together, a project that shows the “adaptability of the human being and the search for new ways of creating art. In addition, it was intimate and domestic like the pandemic itself. Now there is a new way of working.”
Those who participated in this week’s photo shoot were people familiar with Tunick photographic projects. When the artist asked how many had been part of the shots taken at the Zócalo, more than half raised their hands.
The May 2007 photoshoot in the Zócalo was one of the most memorable moments in Spencer’s artistic career. On that occasion, the artist’s request was that the session be carried out with the first rays of the sun and that’s how it was, some eighteen thousand people gathered at 6:00 am and, without further ado, took off their clothes.
After the zócalo shoot, the photographer said that “Mexicans are very open-minded” about baring all for the camera. He told those who participated in this week’s shoot that he would like to return to Mexico to work as long as he has a worthwhile project to work on.
Sources: La Jornada • El Sol de Mexico