LEONARD NIMOY (1931)
Leonard Nimoy made his first photographic image in the early 1940’s using his family’s Bellows Kodak Autographic. In the family’s small Boston apartment the bathroom doubled as Leonard’s darkroom. Entirely seduced by the camera’s image-making power, Leonard took photos of family and friends and assembled a do-it-yourself enlarger built to accommodate the same family Kodak.

Nimoy’s passion for photography led him to UCLA and Robert Heineken’s photography classes in the early 1970’s. Work from this period was published in two volumes of poetry: You and I and Will I Think of You. In 2001, Nimoy received an appointment to become the “artist in residence” at the American Academy in Rome. This residency resulted in the “Borgehse Series”, provocative images inspired by the legendarily risqué Antonio Canova sculpture of Countess Paulina Bonaparte Borghese.

Nimoy’s next large scale project ultimately became his first photographic monograph. SHEKHINA features Nimoy’s luminescent meditation on the feminine aspect of God. The book, which sold out of its first printing in less that a month when published in 2002, galvanized religious scholars and ignited a vigorous public debate. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency wrote, ”Nimoy is igniting an artistic debate...over art and censorship that echoes the battles that swirled over Mapplethorpe and other artists like Andres Serrano and Chris Ofili, who created controversial religious imagery.”

In his next book, THE FULL BODY PROJECT, Nimoy contemplated an entirely different representation of feminine power. Using a series of resplendently large-bodied women, Nimoy deploys his models in joyous un-encumbered movement. With every supremely confident step and proud pose Nimoy’s ladies challenge society’s rigid definition of beauty.

Nimoy’s photography has been exhibited in venues ranging from the Chicago Art Institute to Hebrew Union College in New York to the Museum of Modern Art in Spyros Greece. In addition to his inclusion in numerous private collections, the artist’s work is included in prestigious public collections such as the Jewish Museum in New York, Fondazione Sandrettoo Re Rebaudengo, Per L’Artem in Rome, the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Nimoy has also been featured in many national publications from American Photo to Black & White to Time.