Volunteers strip naked for Spencer Tunick’s ‘Ring’ cycle project

Hundreds of people stripped naked in a Munich, Germany, public square over the weekend for the latest installation by Spencer Tunick, the American photographer who specializes in assembling large numbers of naked bodies for his conceptual projects.

Saturday’s event was a tribute to Richard Wagner’s “Ring” cycle of operas, which are being performed by the Bavarian State Opera. A reported 1,700 people took off their clothes for the project, with about half of the participants painted in gold and the remainder painted in red.

The volunteers arranged themselves in various configurations -- including a pair of concentric red-and-gold rings -- that were intended to be Tunick’s visual interpretations of scenes from the “Ring.”

Tunick has traveled the world staging his nudity-themed photography projects, including recent visits to the Dead Sea in Israel and the Sydney Opera House in Australia. His images aren’t meant to be sexually arousing, but rather are intended “to challenge or reconfigure one’s views of nudity and privacy,” the artist writes on his website.

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