Spencer Tunick stages mass nude photos in Israel to highlight disappearing Dead Sea

With desert peaks stabbing the sky and a thin blue ribbon of Dead Sea shimmering in the distance, the ghostly figures of around 200 men and women — painted head to toe in white — began appearing from behind an outcrop.

Each and every one of them was naked. Which could only mean one thing: World-renowned New York artist Spencer Tunick was back to photograph his latest installation.

Known for coordinating large-scale nude photos in public places, from a Swiss glacier to the steps of the Sydney Opera House, Tunick is also here to help an old friend and collaborator, Ari Leon Fruchter, in his attempts to build a Dead Sea Museum. Indeed, the shoot is taking place on the very spot where the museum may one day stand.

And so, at around 2.45 p.m. on a Sunday afternoon, the participants — aged 19 to 70, and mostly Israeli, though some were from Switzerland, Britain and America, too — walked gingerly on the rocky moonscape into the formation prescribed by Tunick.

The white paint they wore — made especially for the artist — was designed to turn their bodies into conceptual pillars of salt, a reference both to mineral formations that appear in the Dead Sea and to the biblical figure of Lot’s wife, who, according to the book of Genesis, turned into a real pillar of salt as punishment for watching God’s destruction of Sodom.

Tunick hopes to connect this installation with the two he previously organized in the area, in 2011 and 2016,…