Whatever else you might want to say about the work of Spencer Tunick, don’t call it photography. It’s installation art, thank you very much, a distinction that Tunick insists upon. His actual oeuvre isn’t the images of naked multitudes he’s been producing since the early 1990s; it’s his orchestration of those bodies on various sites. The photos are simply the documentation of the work after the fact.

In this respect, Tunick’s methods relate to the Conceptual Art practices of the 1960s and 1970s, and indeed, the work that initially garnered him notice seems to evoke a combination of Earth Art’s grandeur and Body Art’s intimacy. Then of course, there is the frisson of having all that exposed flesh out in the open. Still, the fact that in some cases he poses his models

lying down en masse manages to negate their eroticism and impart his work with a strong whiff of some unspecified genocide or apocalypse.

In his latest project, the Party Series (which TONY’s Green issue cover, shot at the Queens Botanical Garden, is a part of), Tunick takes a page from art history, grouping his models in more intimate settings that manage to evoke everything from Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe and Renoir’s The Luncheon of Boating Party to Ingres’s Turkish bath scenes. Although certain subjects in the new series wear clothes, Tunick is an artist for whom the human body is both paintbrush and sculptural tool, and he places his unique methodology within the grander scope of the figurative tradition.—Howard Halle