Are they nuts? No! They're making art history. (Sort of.) Hundreds of Austrians answered the call of New York photographer Spencer Tunick and showed up at the Ernst Happel Stadium in Vienna wearing nothing but what God gave them.
See what happened when nearly 2,000 people posed naked in Austria's Ernst Happel Stadium for New York photographer Spencer Tunick.
The Associated Press reports that 1,840 people participated in the hours-long photo shoot, during which time they had to follow Tunick's three requests: no sunglasses, no smiling and no underwear. "Stay very still. Don't move," the Austria Press Agency quoted Tunick as telling the crowd as he went to work.
The naked volunteers assumed a variety of poses as ordered by Tunick. Only one of the shots actually involved soccer. Happel Stadium will host seven of the Euro 2008 soccer championship matches being staged by Austria and Switzerland, including the June 29 final.
This isn't the first time Tunick has convinced otherwise ordinary people to take their clothes off for hours at a time along with hundreds of total strangers. He has shot photos of naked people in the main square of Mexico City, lying down on a Swiss glacier and in a South Beach, Florida hotel. Tunick described the shoot in Austria as combining "the spirit of sports, the grand sweeping waves of stadium architecture and the abstract relation of the human form to modern structures."
