Barnes & Nobles

Photographs of pictures in the books by Five Ties Publishing

A conversation with Leonard Nimoy

I just started to concentrate on photography about 15 years ago. I fell in love with photography ever since I was a kid. And the two interests, acting and photography, always traveled side by side. I discovered some years ago that I could more easily support a family as an actor when I could with Fine Art Photography. I did not want to do commercial photography. So, I concentrated on the acting and directing for many years. And then, about 15 years ago, I realized that I no longer need to be concerned financially and I can afford to allow myself doing Fine Art Photography.

The subject matter of the Fat Bottom Review goes back to an incident about 7 years ago when I worked on a project called "Shekhina", it is about the feminine aspect of God.

And one day at a seminar when I was presenting that work, I had just finished when I was approached by a model who had a different body type than I had been photographing and she asks whether I would be interested in working with her. She was a quite large model and we agreed to work together and I hired her for a session. I have a studio in my home in California and she came there and my wife and I worked with her, not very long, for a half hour. And I was nervous about it because she had an unusual figure and I haven’t worked with that kind of body. And I used a couple of photographs in an exhibition. They got a tremendous amount of attention. And I was suddenly surprised and intrigued with this issue of body image.

I realized that the previous work that I have done, models were kind of a concept I worked on. In this work at was about the model, not about my concept, it was about her. And people were intrigued: “Who is she? How do you come to photograph her? What is this all about?”. She looked like a marble sculpture. And the black & white photograph. I realized that I had come into contact with a big issue in our culture. We are surrounded by the body image. Beauty is culture- driven. In our culture we have been taught for many, many years now that think is better, thin is more beautiful. That was not always the case in our culture and that is not always the case in other cultures. In some cultures the additional weight indicates affordance. A husband can afford to feed a wife well. And the poor people are the skinny people. This project I think creates a new way of looking at the issue of beauty in our culture and I think that’s an important subject.