In August we borrowed a line from Captain Picard. This week, meet the Vulcan.
Most of the world knows Leonard Nimoy as Spock: the raised eyebrow, the split-fingered salute, live long and prosper. Far fewer know that after Star Trek and Mission: Impossible, he went back to school. In 1971 he signed up for photography classes at UCLA Extension under Robert Heinecken, one of the sharpest conceptual photographers of his generation. By 2003 the camera had become his main work, and his prints now sit in museum collections from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
And what did Spock choose to photograph? Very often, the nude.
In 2007 he published The Full Body Project, fifty black and white photographs of nude, full-figured women. It began when a full-figured woman asked him to photograph her and her friends. His models came from the Fat Bottom Revue, a San Francisco burlesque troupe founded by Heather MacAllister, an anthropologist by training, who pushed back against the narrow idea of beauty sold by fashion magazines and television. Nimoy posed them in the language of art history: group scenes after Matisse, Duchamp and Raphael, knowing nods to Botticelli, Herb Ritts and Helmut Newton. The same poses the canon has always loved. Different bodies. The point lands without a single word. That October the series went up on the walls of R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, Massachusetts, a gallery show with a symposium to match.
It was not his only venture into the nude. In Shekhina, a 2002 book of about forty photographs, he portrayed women as an image of the feminine presence of God, some nude, others veiled in translucent robes and prayer shawls. It stirred real debate, and it still found its way onto museum walls, including the Griffin Museum of Photography in 2014. Spock, it turns out, was never afraid of a little heat.
You can see a selection of The Full Body Project on the gallery’s own site: www.rmichelson.com/leonard-nimoy-the-full-body-project
He is not alone. Bryan Adams, the voice behind a stack of rock anthems, has built a serious second career behind the lens. His portraits run in Vogue and Vanity Fair, he founded his own art magazine, Zoo, and in 2022 he shot the Pirelli Calendar, the most famous pin-up tradition in the world. His stated aim was pictures that are very sexy, without being overtly sexy. That line could hang over our own door.
Why does any of this matter? Because when people who could photograph anything, anyone, anywhere, choose the nude, they are telling you something about the subject. Not a cheap thrill. The oldest serious subject there is. Nimoy could have shot starships. Instead he boldly went where network television never could, photographing women the culture had told to cover up, and making them monumental.
Our very first newsletter was about Helmut Newton, and how Instagram would ban him today. Nimoy borrowed from Newton, and he would hit the same wall. Post The Full Body Project on a social feed now and the algorithm would flag it before lunch. Think about that: one of the most famous faces on the planet still needed a book and a gallery in a small Massachusetts town to show these pictures. That is exactly why NUDE exists. The photographers in our pages make the same choice Nimoy made, to point the lens at the body on purpose, and for sixty-one issues we have given that choice a home, in print and on every screen that will have it.
So here is our question for you. Does knowing who held the camera change how you see the picture? Would a photograph move you more, or less, if you learned a starship’s science officer had taken it? Tell us in the comments. And if you know another famous name quietly shooting the nude, point us to them. There may be a Part II.
Count us as fans of both: the Vulcan, and the photographer who loved the fine art nude. Work like his is exactly what our Masters issues are made for. The cover at the top of this letter is from Nº 37, our last Masters edition, and a new Masters issue lands this December. We like to think he would have enjoyed it. If you shoot the nude with that kind of conviction, we want to see it.
Live long, and look closely.
See sixty-one issues of the nude, made by people who chose it on purpose, at www.lenudemagazine.com
Esha · The NUDE Team
www.lenudemagazine.com