Posted:
10:53:10 on December 19 2001
By: Steve Krutzler
Dept: People
In a new interview with BeliefNet, Leonard Nimoy talks about his blossoming work in photography, a long-time hobby of the actor who once considered leaving acting to become a photographer:
"There was a time 30 years ago when I studied photography at UCLA when I was considering changing careers entirely. I had done three years of Star Trek and two years on Mission Impossible and I considered changing careers. I was burnt out doing episodic television acting.
"I went to study with a wonderful teacher named Robert Heineken. Then I spent some time following professional commercial photographers around, quite successful people in Los Angeles and New York. I discovered that I did not want to make images to order--catalog clothes, jewelry, make-up, cars--commercial work."
The bulk of the interview concerns Nimoy's body of work surrounding the Jewish concept of the "divine feminine" or "Shekhina," that is, the female presence of God that is invisible. Over the last few years, Nimoy has merged his fascination in the female body as a subject of photography with his spiritualism to try to capture what he envisions as this divine figure.
"This is my Shekhina. This is the way I see her: She is fully female. In one of my images, she is pregnant with a spiritual light. In another, she has given birth to a spiritual light. In some of the other images she is much more sensual than maternal. In some of the images she is very mysterious. In some images she is very frank and facing the camera directly. In others she is veiled.
"My dream concept is that I have a camera and I am trying to photograph what is essentially invisible. And every once in a while I get a glimpse of her and I grab that picture. Sometimes, she happens to be looking at me and is aware that I'm taking the picture and sometimes she's not."
The interesting article also contains several of Nimoy's photographs, which will be published next year in a book entitled "Shekhina," here.
Photograph copyright © Leonard Nimoy.
