More than 100 nude models stripped in front of the New York City headquarters of social media giant Facebook on Sunday, in a photo shoot that was designed to protest the platform’s ban on nudity—specifically on images of female nipples. According to a CNN report, the event was organized by the National Coalition Against Censorship and photographer Spencer Tunick—who has made a specialty of creating elaborate photographs featuring large groups of naked people.
Tunick posted a short video of the Facebook protest on—where else?—his Facebook page Sunday.
The photographer explained that the women in the protest wore stickers of male nipples over their own nipples, as they held up photos of male nipples. “There is no reason for Facebook or Instagram to censor this video or block from hashtags,” Tunick wrote in his Facebook post. And indeed, the video on Tunick’s page did not appear to have been censored.
The shoot was part of the NCAC #WeTheNipple campaign, an ongoing protest against censorship of nudity.
“The nudity ban prevents many artists from sharing their work online. It particularly harms artists whose work focuses on their own bodies, including queer and gender-nonconforming artists, and the bodies of those in their communities,” the #WeTheNipple group says on its site.
“It's just downright mean, hurtful and unnecessary to allow male nipples and not female nipples on their platform,” Tunick said, as quoted by the tech site CNet.
Whether the protest will actually lead to a change in Facebook’s policy—which also applies to its subsidiary, Instagram—is another question, however. Asked about the protest by CNet, a Facebook soplesperson said only, "We look forward to continuing the dialogue with NCAC and other affected groups in more detail.”
The shoot, which reportedly involved 125 nude models, was far from Tunick’s biggest group nude installation, however. That would likely be a 2007 shoot in Mexico City in which a reported 18,000 participants got naked for Tunick’s group photo. Last year in Colombia, Tunick organized a nude shoot with 6,000 models.
Photo By Carlos Ramón Bonilla / Wikimedia Commons
