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Cleveland, June 27, 2004 – foto by Spencer Tunick

We went up to the Cleveland Museum of Art today, and there I was up on the wall. Me, not my art – and I was unrecognizable. They had a huge foto of Spencer Tunick’s mass nude shoot hanging, and I was one of the 2,754 Clevelanders who took their clothes off June 27, 2004.

Everyone who stripped got a small foto (my copy is the shot above), and the museum bought a large copy of the same shot. I’m near the upper end, right at the line where the light becomes darker. As we were getting ready for this shot, a garbage truck started to turn onto the street we were on and it stopped for a long time before backing up. I always wondered what the early Sunday morning garbage crew thought when after driving through the deserted downtown they turn onto East 9th street and suddenly see 2,754 naked people.

It was exhilarating and freeing to simultaneously strip with 2,753 other folk. There was a bit of excitement before I disrobed as I’d look about and think I’d soon see all these folk nude; but once we were naked, I felt no hint of eroticism or sex. It was more simple amazement at seeing so many naked bodies in motion, and not one of them perfect or the same. Fat people, thin people, old, young, tall, short, mastectomies, polio braces, humongous bellies, hanging asses, misshapen breasts, misaligned breasts, missized breasts, tattoos, gorgeous, ugly, Asian, Indian, black, white. It was just at sunrise and it was cold by the lake, so the penises tended to be small.

In the foto above which has both men and women, we were lying on painfully cold concrete so there wasn’t a lot of looking around – I just grit my teeth and tried not to shiver too much. The street was so cold it hurt. In the second foto, Tunick had just the females disrobe and form a pubic-shaped triangle of over 1,500 women. The men just watched in silent awe. The final shot was just men, and the women became quite raucous and rowdy as they taunted us while we stripped – perhaps payback for thousands of years of us ogling them.

I’d do it again in a Cleveland minute. Though preferably in warmer weather.


me in beard and glasses grinning upper left
photograph by Chris Stephens | © The Plain Dealer

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