CityLife

Interview: Spencer Tunick (Everyday People)

Spencer Tunick

The Lowry - from June 12, 2010

Everybody involved with Spencer Tunick’s Everyday People to celebrate the Lowry’s 10th anniversary expected it to be a success, but they were surprised to receive 5,000 applicants willing to bare all in front of Tunick’s camera lens.

Asked to stand on the streets of Manchester in their birthday suits in the very early hours of the morning, the selected 1,000 were ferried from iconic parks to notable landmarks to create Tunick’s latest collection of outstanding photographs last month.

The secret to the project’s success is the fact the photographs work on many different levels.

They are, as Tunick himself would admit, logistically challenging to organise (albeit significantly smaller than his biggest shoot, which featured 18,000 volunteers) but the finished projects invoke many reactions – adoration, passion, humour, wonderment and a feeling of serenity.

Tunick says his work has evolved into a multi-dimensional project. Tongue in cheek, he refers to Everyday People as a ‘naked tale of two cities’: Salford and Manchester.

“The Lowry brought me here for two days,” he explains, “and they showed me the paintings and locations and I just said, ‘Buses! We need buses all over the place’.

“The ability to work at many locations is a gift to me – I don’t usually get the funding to do that and getting the permissions is incredibly difficult.

“Kate (Farrell, from the Lowry) is a great curator and she thought it would be possible, and that really shows the spirit of the city.

“I wanted to use the bodies a little bit more elaborately to create the flesh architecture, to create these sculptural substances in which the medium is the body.

“Some of my work is very much a colour field of bodies, other parts of my work are more in the vein of traditional portraiture engaging faces, and my newest element in the work is working with props and incorporating colour.”

For Everyday People, Tunick has focused on the local connections between what he does and what other artists have done before him – more specifically, LS Lowry, whose matchstick men have informed the chosen locations and the compositions themselves.

There is, says Tunick, a sense of movement in the works that he hasn’t used before – cultural, academic and industrial movement replacing the physical shuffle of Lowry’s figures – and a specially commissioned film.

The resulting exhibition will be an assembly of Tunick’s and Lowry’s work. “Hopefully people will feel like they’re just part of the whole picture.

“The naked body still freaks out organisations – but art brings us further in accepting people are different and makes it a more colourful world.

“People won’t be overtaken by the naked body: I think it will be this non-violent fight between nature and the concrete world.

“It’ll be perceived like 1984 or the complete opposite where the people are controlling the streets.”

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