Actor’s first major photo exhibit depicts people’s alter egos.


By CHARLES McGRATH

NORTH ADAMS, Massachusetts - A few people have bought a Leonard Nimoy photograph without knowing who Leonard Nimoy is. Most likely they are migrants who arrived here through a wormhole from the Gamma Quadrant, where reruns of the TV series “Star Trek” have yet to penetrate.

Mr. Nimoy, who for more than 40 years was Spock, the pointy-eared, half-Vulcan science officer on the Starship Enterprise, has been an accomplished photographer for nearly that long, and his work has been collected by several museums. He has been taking pictures since he was 13, when he developed them in the family bathroom in Boston’s West End, and in the early ‘70s he studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, with Robert Heinecken, a conceptual photographer so rigorous, Mr. Nimoy said recently, that he thought if you happened to see a body falling from the sky, you would be wrong to take a picture of it unless you were already embarked on a study of objects moving through space. Anything else was mere photojournalism.

In the mid-70s Mr. Nimoy even considered quitting acting and taking up photography full time, and now, at 79, he says he is finally finished with movies and television. “I was really done a long time ago,” he said over lunch in a cafe at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the site of his new exhibit . “But I agreed to make that last ‘Star Trek’ movie because I thought the Spock character hadn’t had a chance for closure.”

Still, though Mr. Nimoy has long been at pains to distance himself from “Star Trek” in his photographic work and his life in general - at one point even writing a book called “I Am Not Spock” - the Spock persona has proved to be as hard to escape as the Klingon prison planet.

Michael Kusek, who posed for Mr. Nimoy’s most recent project, “Secret Selves,” wearing borrowed dog tags, swigging from a bottle of Jim Beam and generally trying to look tough and street-wise, said of first meeting the photographer: “There he was with that voice that has been in the background culturally my whole life. I blew my cool.” He added: “When I was a kid, I was always doing Spock. I can still do the eyebrow thing.”

“Secret Selves,” an exhibition of 26 color photographs, 11 of them life-size, is Mr. Nimoy’s first solo show at a major museum. Over a couple of very long days in 2008, he photographed 95 or so residents of nearby Northampton, Massachusetts, who had been encouraged to reveal their hidden natures any way they chose.

A rabbi came bare-chested and wearing leather . A transgendered former Marine appeared in a cancan costume. The mayor of Northampton showed up with an electric guitar, and the chief executive of an advertising firm dressed himself as a wizard.

For at least two of the subjects, the experience of being photographed proved transformative. A writer who posed with a violin but had to be shown how to hold it has since taken up the instrument for real. And Tammy Twotone, the transgendered former Marine, decided to stop living a double life.

Mr. Nimoy said: “So many people have said that the project has made them wonder about whether they have a secret self, and inevitably some of them ask about my secret self. Are you kidding? I’ve had 60 years of acting out my other selves. Been there, done that.”