Naked Bodies

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050724/asp/look/story_5025503.asp
Naked truth
NILANJANA S. ROY
How could they do that?" my friend said. We were discussing photographer
Spencer Tunick's "installation" in Newcastle, for which he persuaded roughly
1,700 ordinary people to pose naked. My friend is a bright writer, but to
her the idea that you might strip in public along with a bunch of strangers
was repugnant.
She hated the images Tunick produced, found them unsettling and
disconcerting. In Mumbai, the critic Khalid Ansari excoriated Tunick: was
this really art, he asked, this display of "ugly, disgusting bodies?"
I looked at those two adjectives and suddenly, what Tunick is trying to do
fell into place. If you look at his images without prejudice, you can't help
but be touched and surprised at the amazing patterns human bodies can make:
like shoals of fish in the sea, like pink and white streaks of light. Very
few people have perfect forms. The men have bellies that sag, or skinny
legs, or drooping shoulders; the women have heavy hips, fat bottoms, sagging
breasts, too little muscle on their stomachs or too much.
You could call those bodies "ugly" and "disgusting", if what you're used to
seeing is the absolute standard of perfection that the media forces on us.
Male nudity has never been as titillating or as much of a commodity as
female nudity; to me, the value of Tunick's pictures was that they made me
realise how seldom we are offered pictures of naked men, how little we
assess or analyse or think about the male body.
Female nudity is all over the place; in "wardrobe malfunctions", in the
films, on the Net, hinted at in ads. And what we see is. perfect. Tunick's
pictures made me realise how little those images have to do with real women.
Real women have bodies that unfold like maps, every wrinkle and scar and
curve of fat telling its own story. Real women have cellulite and boobs that
aren't aerodynamic marvels. I hadn't noticed how seldom we see real women,
how eagerly, pathetically, painfully we try to live up to some impossible
ideal of beauty.
"We live in a world where the media can go out of its way to mock those in
the public eye whose bodies aren't perfect and it's easy to absorb the
message that an extra 10 lb or 50 lb makes you unworthy. When people pose, I
think it heightens their awareness of their own bodies, how precious life
is.," Tunick said of his work.
You have to be blinkered, sick and a slave to the idea that there is only
one standard of beauty for the body, to think that those bodies in those
photographs are "ugly" and "disgusting". Tunick's images offer hope, a
counterpoint to the world of swimsuit calendars and beauty contests, a sense
of wonder in the ordinary, astonishing bodies that all of us are stuck with.
I think of all those young men ferociously working out, filling their bodies
with steroids; all those anorexic, neurotic young women who know that no
matter what they do, their bodies will fall short of some adman's ideal. And
I wish they could look at these pictures that don't idealise the nude but
celebrate the human figure in all its variety, and see that beauty can lurk
in the most imperfect of things.