Nimoy’s Next Frontier
Leonard Nimoy’s home studio serves as a mini-gallery of his works. There are black-and-white photographs from his "Shekhina" series (2002), which features slender women representing Shekhina (a Hebrew term for a feminine manifestation of God on earth), and new images from "Full Body Project" (2007). "After a show of works from ‘Shekhina,’ a large-bodied woman came up to me and asked if I’d like to work with other body types. So I photographed her, and the reaction to those photographs was so profound that I began to explore body size."

The models for "Full Body Project" are from the San Francisco plus-size burlesque troupe "Fat-Bottom Revue." They and Nimoy replicated such iconic images as Matisse’s "Dance," Marcel Duchamp’s "Nude Descending a Staircase" and photographs by Herb Ritts. The book has just been published by Five Ties Publishing, Brooklyn, November 1.

"I’ve been a photographer since I was a teenager," Nimoy says. "Since then I’ve always had a connection to black-and-white photography. After doing the ‘Star Trek’ series and ‘Mission Impossible,’ I considered changing careers. I studied at UCLA’s photography department and followed commercial photographers in L.A. After that, I decided I wanted to do fine-art photography instead and keep acting and directing. However, for the last 14 years, I’ve withdrawn from theatrical work and I just do photography." Leonard is represented by several galleries, including the R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, Massachusetts, and Louis Stern Fine Arts in Los Angeles.