Spencer Tunick is known for his installations of large groups of naked people. This one was taken in the Netherlands in 2007.

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Spencer Tunick has a vision:

Five hundred naked people standing next to 500 cacti.

"I'd like to get a company to make a clear-shoe so people can walk in the desert naked," he said, driving in a convertible from Phoenix to Tucson, where he was to attend today's opening of "Oh l'Amour: Contemporary Photography from the Stéphane Janssen Collection."

Tunick, who has traveled around the world taking photographs of his installations of naked people in the most unlikely of places, has some of his photographic works in the show.

Though he has done photographs of smaller numbers of nudes in the state, he has yet to do one here with the masses of nudes he has become known for.

Like the one he did of 18,000 people in Mexico City. That was his biggest one, he said.

"I shot just before sunrise," he recalled. "It was just beginning to be light. I was racing the sun; it was difficult to get 18,000 people to curl up into a ball, on their knees."

He had some help. First, there were 18,000 people willing to shed their clothes. And the government, which gave permission for the installation — Tunick prefers that word to photographs — provided 250 people to keep block off traffic, as well as a portable sound system that allowed Tunick to bark orders loud enough for all to hear.

But racing the sun and persuading thousands to disrobe and curl up isn't the hardest part. Not by a long shot.

"The most difficult part is getting permission from conservative governments or institutions to agree that the body can be used as art in a public place," he said. "People have a stigma about the naked body. You just have to get the conservative institutions to believe in the body as art."