Around 2,500 Australians Pose Naked For Skin Cancer Awareness
Source: Forbes, November 2022
Here’s a news flash from Down Under. Actually, it was a bit longer than a flash. On Saturday, November 26, around 2,500 people assembled completely naked at the crack of dawn on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, for a photo shoot. Why were all these folks willing to expose everything down under and up over? Well, their goal was to bring more exposure to a growing problem: skin cancer.
This wasn’t just a spontaneous flash-mob so to speak. It was a planned “Strip Off for Skin Cancer” photo shoot organized by Spencer Tunick, a U.S.-based photographer who’s known for doing such massive photo shoots around the world and Skin Check Champions, an Australian non-profit organization that’s championing, you guessed it, skin checks. The organizer had sent out invitations to roughly 2,500 people to assemble on the beach in their bare essentials. This beach of a photo shoot came on the last day of Australia’s National Skin Cancer Action Week. an annual occurrence coordinated by the Cancer Council and the Australasian College of Dermatologists.
Participation in this photo shoot was free—free of entry fees and free of clothes, that is. All you needed was skin, a willingness to show all of that skin, and an eagerness to raise awareness about the cancers that each year kill over 2,000 people in Australia and costs the country over one billion dollars, according to the Cancer Council. Local authorities also lifted restrictions on nudity on Bondi Beach for the first time to accommodate the event since it would have been kind of problem if everyone had gotten arrested.