The photographer Spencer Tunick staged a mass nude photo shoot outside Facebook’s headquarters to protest its nudity policies.
As dawn broke on Sunday and most of New York City was still asleep, 125 people gathered outside Facebook’s headquarters in Manhattan, stripped bare, and posed for photographer Spencer Tunick. The performance wasn’t merely exhibitionism—these nude models had a mission. They were launching a movement known as #wethenipple, a protest against social media’s prohibition on the female nipple, a policy that has bedeviled artists and art historians for years.
The participants convened at The Bean coffee shop a few blocks away from Facebook’s Astor Place HQ, where they got a pep talk from Tunick as well as some basic instructions about how the shoot would go down. At about 5:15 a.m., the group—the majority of whom were women, with a handful of men for good measure—traipsed over to the plaza, dropped trough, and assembled in front of the social media giant’s nondescript building.
By 5:45 a.m., it was over.
A collaboration between Tunick and the National Coalition Against Censorship, the shoot was designed to call on Facebook and Instagram to reconsider their policies regarding nudity and artistic expression. “We’re here to protest against the pretty harsh rules against nudity and censorship,” Tunick said. He suggested that Facebook and Instagram could follow the lead of YouTube, which has “a verification process for artists, a platform for them to share their work.”
As the community guidelines now stand, women’s nipples are not allowed to be displayed, unless in certain contexts, like breastfeeding, or to depict the aftermath of mastectomy surgery. Men, meanwhile, have no such rules applied to their bodies. In a cheeky bid to avoid running afoul of Facebook’s policies—and to illustrate just how ludicrous they believe they are—the models in Tunick’s shoot covered their private parts with nipple stickers created by the NCAC.[…]
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