In July 1994, Spencer Tunick phoned all the people who had expressed interest in posing nude individually for his public street photographs and asked them to come together as group. Of all the locations in New York the artist could have chosen for this first group work, he decided to pick the epicenter of world politics, the United Nations. A total of 25 people showed up to pose on that remarkable early morning, naked and brave in front of the General Assembly building. This day launched Tunick’s Reaction Zone series.
The Book Reaction Zone presents the definitive collection of Tunick’s early New York City photographic assemblages of nudes. The artworks included combine risk and urgency as Tunick collaborates with the participants creating fast-forming gestural splashes of figures, at times referencing action painting.
In his introduction for Reaction Zone, Carlo McCormick relays the feel of making work on the city streets and the pressure of creating “human graffiti” under the radar of the authorities.
Hardcover, 9 3/4” x 11 1/4” (29.8 x 24.8 cm) ,
First Edition
112 pages
Printed in the USA, 2016
Stephane Janssen participated in Spencer Tunick’s group installations and individual portraits between the ages of 65 and 80, a late bloomer one might say. Janssen amassed the largest collection of Tunick’s photographs during these years as he would participate and then collect the works that he was in and others that he admired. This book chronicles that collection, from the first time he posed in 2000 with 25 people in Harlem, various personal commissions, to one of Janssen's last times participating in Tunick's work where he was painted head to toe in red body paint with over one thousand other painted people on the streets of Munich, Germany. To Stephane Janssen age was no barrier to participation in art. Tunick found a patron and muse in Janssen and they remained close friends until his passing in September of 2020.
Stephane Janssen’s personal collection of Tunick’s photographs were on exhibition at the ASU Art Museum and this book was made in conjunction with the timing of that exhibit.
Photographs in the book include works not previously published from: the Dead Sea, Israel; the Saatchi Gallery, London; the Bull Wall at the Port of Dublin, Ireland; the Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Germany; the Burning Man Festival, Nevada; Gaasbeek Castle, Belgium; the Lyon Biennale, France; the Lowry in Salford and Manchester, England; the Ernst Happel Stadium, Austria; Museum Kunst Palast in Dusseldorf, Germany; Amsterdam, the Netherlands, among others.
Hardcover, 9 3/4″ x 11 1/4” (29.8 x 24.8 cm,)
First Edition
112 Pages
Printed in the USA, 2016