When I decide to go outside nude (not that any of you would ever want to see that), I don't think I'd be doing it outdoors on a glacier. But hundreds of people posed naked this weekend on Switzerland's shrinking Aletsch glacier today for a publicity campaign to expose the impact of climate change.Now how in the heck is this going to make me think about global warming?
US photographer Spencer Tunick, as part of a Greenpeace campaign, perched on a ladder and used a megaphone to direct nearly 600 volunteers from all over Europe while photographing them on a rocky outcrop overlooking the glacier, which is the largest in the Alps.Later he took pictures of them standing in groups on the mass of ice and lying down. Camera crews were staged at five different points on the glacier to take photographs. The environmental group Greenpeace, which organised the shoot, said the aim was to "establish a symbolic relationship between the vulnerability of the melting glacier and the human body". Only one image comes to mind on my body when I think of the relationship of a "melting glacier!"
Tunick has staged mass nude photo shoots in cities across the world, from Newcastle in Britain to Mexico City, where a record 18,000 people took off their clothes in the Mexican capital's Zocalo square in May. Other backdrops have included the Gateshead Centre for Contemporary Art in Britain (2005), the Biennale in Lyon, France (2005), and Grand Central Station in New York (2003). Speaking to Geneva's Le Temps newspaper in an interview published before the shoot today, Tunick said his photographs were both works of art and political statements."I will try to treat the body on two levels. On an abstract level, as if they were flowers or stones. And on a more social level, to represent their vulnerability and humanity with regard to nature and the city and to remind people where we come from." And I think he probably has some other motives but we won't mention them here.
Greenpeace, the radical group who thinks that the world is always going to end in the next 24 hours, hopes its billboard and poster campaign showing people exposed to the cold will send a shiver down the spines of the public and politicians, and convince them to do more to tackle pollution and climate change. "They'll be used at the right moment for our campaign, in Switzerland first and then worldwide," Mr de Roten says.Now this in no way makes me think about global warming. Would you want to see me naked in front of some historic landmark? I don't think so! In addition, the only thing this will do for the Global Warming hype is create another half-million jobs in which the workers must commute using their large SUV's! Of course, that's just my opinion, I may be a little cold!
