The Full Body Project: Photographs by Leonard Nimoy

Photographer Leonard Nimoy has had a long-term relationship with the articulation of beauty.  Since his early immersion in the language of photography (he studied with UCLA’s famed Robert Heineken), Nimoy has created an extensive and provocative portfolio featuring the female nude.  Using this traditional subject, Nimoy has explored the spiritual (the Shekhina Project), the sculptural (the Borghese Series – inspired by Canova’s “Paulina”) and the voluptuous (the Classic Nudes series).  The classic elements of light and shadow, line and silhouette, visual rhythms moving in and out of focus, in concert with the photographer’s will, define these works.

With The Full Body Project, Nimoy has surrendered his masterful control in order to discover a beauty known only, at least initially, to his models.  These women are not interested in shadow.  They are interested in joyous even rapturous display.  Nimoy’s photographs dare us to respond to these flirtatious Rubenesque muses before our current cultural obsession with thinness rushes our eyes to judgment.  Nimoy’s open-minded and wide-eyed photographic embrace of what he truly sees, alive and in the flesh before him, liberates our perception of what is beautiful in the female form.  In The Full Body Project, it seems Nimoy and his models have placed their collective skills in service to Gandhi’s maxim “Show them the truth and they will see beauty afterwards.”