Spencer Tunick:

Young And Naked In The Streets Of New York

Popular music is usually the prisoner of the circumstances of its production, a song forever recalling a certain time and events in the lives of its listeners. Occasionally a hit tune manages to transcend that fate to stand in for the ideals of a whole generation.

So Spencer Tunick believes when he plays tracks by his current faves before a shoot: Nirvana, The Beastie Boys and Pavement. The social consciousness of the twenty- some things' music is what inspires Tunick's photographs of nudes in the streets of the cities of the world, and the attendant risks of arrest and imprisonment.

By choosing to live and work with those threats, Tunick has become an idealistic agent of change, backed up by some heavyweight legal advice. "It is illegal right now to be totally nude outdoors in New York city," he explains in reference to his recent arrest for photographing a naked male draped over a Christmas decoration in Rockefeller Center.

"We were detained by the Center's security people, the model and me handcuffed together until the police came," says Tunick. "We were put behind bars and charged with criminal trespass, lewd behaviour and disorderly conduct. The police confiscated my film, camera and lightmeter, but I secretly switched the roll. They got the wrong one, and I got the photographs."

Tunick cannily chose attorney Ron Kuby and his partner William Kunstler to represent him in court, and succeeded in having the lewdness charge dropped, theoretically making nakedness legal in New York.

"Then they dropped all three charges but added a fourth," reports Tunick, ""exposure of a person in a public place." Ron thinks it's going to trial. We're not going to give in, because this is what I do and I want to find a way to do it without being stopped by the law."

Tunick didn't have the lawyers who also defended Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Abbie Hoffman behind him when he was arrested for photographing five nudes on the cobblestones in front of the National Assembly Building in Paris, however.

"The French police could not believe my models were doing it just for a piece of art, to make something beautiful and fun. They thought it had to be for a magazine or advertising," he says. "They let us go, but made us sign statements that we wouldn't do this again or we'd be kicked out of the country." Tunick has vowed to return there soon to carry out the shoot he had planned for the following day, with fifteen French citizens sans culottes and everything else.

Although deeply affected by Kurt Cobain's death, Tunick possesses none of the nihilism that spurred on his hero's suicide. In June he is planning a huge photograph in his nation's capital. "It's an arrow of 150 people pointing towards Washington, an awareness sign saying the naked truth is that we're conscious of what's going on, and of the human condition. A lot of my photographs are very environmentally based", explains this fourth generation social documentary photographer.

With the Tunicks it seems that old family traditions die hard, although one hopes that does not also apply in the case of the Cobain family.