EmailAs it turns out, when he was not cruising through space at warp factor 9 or pinching people in the neck to make them pass out, Leonard Nimoy, (aka Mr. Spock) was a very dedicated and talented photographer.
For those who are too young to remember, (or were simply not geeks in the 1960s) Leonard Nimoy played Commander Spock on the Starship Enterprise in its first iteration as a TV series on NBC.
The pilot aired in 1964, but Nimoy continued even as it became movies, making his last appearance in 2013 - a pretty good run.
Nimoy's career in Hollywood got off to a less than promising start, selling vacuum cleaners and taking whatever parts he could in both films and TV.
Nimoy played an Army sergeant in the 1954 science fiction thriller Them! and a professor in the 1958 science fiction movie The Brain Eaters, and had a role in The Balcony (1963), a film adaptation of the Jean Genet play. With Vic Morrow, he co-produced a 1965 film version of Deathwatch, an English-language film version of Genet's play Haute Surveillance, adapted and directed by Morrow and starring Nimoy. The story dealt with three prison inmates. Partly as a result of his role, he then taught drama classes to members of Synanon, a drug rehab center, explaining: "Give a little here and it always comes back.
His big break came with the Spock role in the TV series and it was as though he was made for it.
I am not writing here about his acting career, but rather his photographic career.
The Richard Michelson Gallery, in Northhampton Mass., carries his work and has an outstanding presentation of his photographs on their website, which you can access here. Nimoy Photos
I am not going to post the photos here, as I don't have the rights, and also, Mr. Michelson is selling them for anywhere from $1500 to $25,000, I am sure he would not appreciate my reproducing them for free.
That having been said, be sure to click on the link and check out Spock's creative side. I particularly like that he shot with a digital Hasselblad (my camera of choice) and that he seemed to have a real proclivity for nudes.
As the emotionless Mr. Spock might have observed: "fascinating".
