Hundreds of people posed naked on Switzerland's shrinking
Aletsch glacier on Saturday for US photographer Spencer Tunick as
part of a Greenpeace campaign to raise awareness of global
warming.
Tunick, perched on a ladder and using a megaphone, directed
nearly 600 volunteers from all over Europe and photographed them on
a rocky outcrop overlooking the glacier, which is the largest in
the Alps.
Later he took pictures of them standing in groups on the mass of
ice and lying down. Camera crews were staged at five different
points on the glacier to take photographs.
Glaciers are sensitive to climate change and have been receding
since the start of the industrial age but the pace of shrinkage has
accelerated in recent years.
The environmental group Greenpeace, which organised the shoot,
said the aim was to "establish a symbolic relationship between the
vulnerability of the melting glacier and the human body."
The Aletsch descends around the south side of the Jungfrau
mountain in the Upper Rhone Valley.
Alpine glaciers have lost about one-third of their length and
half their volume over the past 150 years. The Aletsch ice mass has
retreated by 115 metres (377 ft) in the last two years alone, said
Greenpeace.
Tunick has staged mass nude photo shoots in cities across the
world, from Newcastle, Britain, to Mexico City, where a record
18,000 people took off their clothes in the Mexican capital's
Zocalo square in May.
Speaking to Geneva's Le Temps newspaper in an interview
published before the shoot on Saturday, Tunick said his photographs
were both works of art and political statements.
"I will try to treat the body on two levels. On an abstract
level, as if they were flowers or stones. And on a more social
level, to represent their vulnerability and humanity with regard to
nature and the city and to remind people where we come from."
Switzerland has about 1,800 glaciers and almost of them are
losing ground.
Greenpeace said if global warming continues unabated, most
glaciers will disappear from the Earth by 2080.
(Agencies via CRI.cn and Xinhua August 19, 2007)
