I really didn’t know where to put this thread. It’s certainly not a pitting. I’m not specifically asking for opinions or debate, and I’m not looking for a specific answer, or if I am, I want that answer to be shaded and expanded on by divers opinions and recouinted experiences.
Anyhow, last night on HBO there was a show about this photographer, Spencer Tunick, who’s shtick consists mainly of photographing nudes in urban, outdoor spaces. I say shtick, because while on one hand I admire the gumption of anyone who wants to push the envelope of the nudity taboo, on the other hand it seems like that’s all there is here, and I hesitate to consider it the art as which it’s being presented. The HBO show was not about the artist as an artist per se, but more about his interactions with people in asking them to participate as models, and the reactions of some of the passersby. A few people were photographed individually, but his main motif seems to be getting a large crowd of people to strip their clothes off and photograping them from high above, so the gathered bodies look like wood grain.
Light-colored wood grain, like Civil Service Blond Cheap Furniture Wood.
Because in a large nude crowd scene shot in Brooklyn there seemed to be not a single person of color. There were several other shoots in major American and European cities where you would expect a substantial nonwhite population to live, but all these crowd scenes looked as though they’d been shot in Trondheim, Norway, Des Moines, IA, or the Outer Hebrides. Every picture was a solid mass of pink flesh.
At one point, they did go to Japan, and get a few people to participate in individual shots. I suppose that’d be the most prominent example of some non-white people participating. But there was no crowd shot. And even in Johannesburg, South Africa most of the people who went along were white.
So are non-Caucasians in fact more disapproving of nudity? Or shyer about nudity?