"I admire the way [Leonard Nimoy] presented the women as standing there looking the viewer full in the face."

"Saying look at me � I�m entitled to stand here and present myself to the world. I don�t have to be ashamed and cower in the corner," wrote Natalie Angier in the foreword to the photography book "The Full Body Project." (Clicking the link won't display nudity on screen, but scrolling down will.)

"It really disturbed him that women who considered themselves overweight had this terrible feeling about themselves... He wanted to show the world that there�s beauty to be found in different body types."

I noted Nimoy's photography project back in 2007, in a post that read "So, Leonard Nimoy is into fat women. I have a similar preference." The link on "similar preference" went to a 2005 post titled "Drawing from the nude model":

My undergraduate degree is in Fine Arts, and I've spent many hours drawing from a live model, both in art school and in evening sessions here at UW....

It can also be tiresome to draw from the model. You may think it's always going to be interesting to look at a naked person, but many people who try to be artist's models are not very good. You need an interesting body and an ability to find a good pose and hold it. The artist can move around looking for a good angle on a pose, but with some models there are no interesting angles. Try drawing a thin man! The best models are overweight women -- like the woman in the photo at the link. One reason I stopped doing the evening drawing sessions here at UW was that nearly all the models were thin. I mean, if I want to draw landscapes, I'd go to the mountains, not the plains.

ADDED: The 2007 post linked to a NYT article titled "Girth and Nudity, a Pictorial Mission":

Mr. Nimoy... admits that before he began ["The Full Body Project"], it had never occurred to him that beauty might be culture driven.... His enlightenment came about eight years ago, when he had been showing pictures from his Shekhina series � sensual, provocative images of naked women in religious Jewish wear � at a lecture in Nevada. 

(Nimoy � according to Wikipedia � was "the son of Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jewish immigrants from Iziaslav, Soviet Union (now Ukraine). His parents left Iziaslav separately�his father first walking over the border into Poland�and reunited in the United States.")

Afterward, a 250-pound woman approached him and asked if he wanted to take pictures of her, a different body type....

�The nudity wasn�t the problem,� he said, �but I�d never worked with that kind of a figure before. I didn�t quite know how to treat her. I didn�t want to do her some kind of injustice. I was concerned that I would present this person within the envelope of an art form.�

But soon he relaxed into it, lulled by the clicking of the camera and the woman�s comfort with her body. He placed some of the shots in various exhibitions, and they invariably garnered the most attention. �People always wanted to know: �Who is she? How did you come to shoot her? Why? Where? What was it all about?� �