By Judith Scherr

At 68 Leonard Nimoy says he's free to explore dimensions of life. Spirituality, emotion, mysticism. Having returned to an old medium that was his love in the youth: fine arts photography. At the Photographer's Gallery in Palo Alto, the black and white photographs are displayed under the name of Shekhina, the feminine presence of God.

Q: When did you become interested in photography?
Leonard Nimoy: I have photographs that go back to when I was 13 years old. I did a whole bunch of work then and again in the ‘70s. A large body of work has been published in some books of poetry. Four or five years ago, I started again... I actually considered the possibility of a career as a commercial photographer..."

Q: There's a dramatic use of light and shadow in your work. Did your experience as a director teach you something about the use of light?
Leonard Nimoy: I think you are right I think my lighting could be called theatrical. It's an intentionally sort of nourish, moody, evocative, I hope, of an emotional condition or a mood, and it has very much to do with my eye when I am directing as well... I think I became more conscious of what moved me when I see lighting, and I began to reach for that. I am hoping to capture emotion with lighting as well as the subject matter.

Q:  How does the shin play into the feelings and the thoughts behind the photos?
Leonard Nimoy: In a word, it's all about goddesses.

Q: What does goddess mean to you?
LN: What it means to me is an appreciation for feminism, femininity, feminist spirituality. Spirituality to me is a very feminine thing. I live with a wife who's very much a spiritual, feeling, loving person. I'm constantly in touch with that. We are very much in touch with various aspects of research into the roots of feminine mysticism. It's just terribly interesting to me that all of these threads were able to come together for me, in my work, in these photographs. There are three major threads in the work that you saw. There is figure photography; there are the images of hands in various gestures, based on the Kabbalistic shin gesture; and then there's the combination, the female figure with the shin somewhere in the image... I had been doing research of the origin of the shin...It finally became clear to me, that the shin was the invoking of the Shekhina, which is the spiritual feminine essence of God into the sanctuary... to me it's all about spirituality. It's very mystical to me. Does it come from within us?... There's no image that represents the whole thing, they are all aspects of it. They are all process of studies on the subject.

 Q: Is it a transformative time in your life?
Leonard Nimoy: Yes, definitely. People ask me ‘What are you doing?' and it is the most difficult thing to talk about... I am just working on my photography... It's a process of shifting gears into another kind of mentality. And when you ask ‘Is it transformative?' that's exactly what it is.

 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/04/02/PN79511.DTL