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