Leonard Nimoy
Leonard Nimoy was born on March 26, 1931, in the West End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts, into an English- and Yiddish-speaking household. He attended Boston English High School before going on to study at Boston College, Boston University, Antioch College, and the University of California, Los Angeles, a broad educational path that reflected the range of pursuits he would take up across his career.
Nimoy worked as an actor, television actor, voice actor, film director, writer, musician, poet, and photographer — a spread of creative occupations that kept him active across multiple fields throughout his life. He is associated with the Vulcan salute, a hand gesture that became one of his notable contributions to popular culture. His work in television earned him the Saturn Award for Best Guest Starring Role, and he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, recognitions that marked his standing in the American entertainment industry. Both English and Yiddish informed his personal and professional life, connecting his work to the cultural world of his Boston upbringing as much as to the Hollywood milieu he later inhabited.
Nimoy died on February 27, 2015, in Bel Air, California, as a United States citizen who had built a career stretching from the stages and classrooms of Boston to the film and television studios of Los Angeles. His Saturn Award and his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame stand as concrete markers of a career that moved across acting, directing, writing, music, photography, and poetry over the course of more than six decades.
Quotes by Leonard Nimoy
Leonard Nimoy's insights on:
Spock is definitely one of my best friends. When I put on those ears, it's not like just another day. When I become Spock, that day becomes something special.
I became enamored with photography when I was about 13 or 14 years old. I've been at it ever since. I studied seriously in the '70s.
I have a master's degree in photography as a fine art, and I would call my work primarily conceptual. I don't carry cameras with me wherever I go. I get an idea of a subject matter I want to deal with and I pull out my cameras.
I think about myself as like an ocean liner that's been going full speed for a long distance, and the captain pulls the throttle back all the way to 'stop,' but the ship doesn't stop immediately, does it? It has its own momentum and it keeps on going, and I'm very flattered that people are still finding me useful.
I did not move into developing or processing color. I stayed with black and white. I still think to this day that I prefer to work in black and white if it has to do with poetry or anything other than specific reality. I have worked in color when I thought it was the appropriate way to express the thought that I was working on.
I began working with a family camera. It was called a Kodak Autographic, which was one of those things where you flopped it open and pulled out the bellows. And I've been at it ever since; I've never stopped.
Most of my images have been done in-studio, under very controlled lighting conditions. There have been a few that have been shot in nature, but even then they were shot almost exclusively at night, and again, under controlled lighting conditions.
What I'm exploring right now is the subject of my own mortality. It's an area that I'm curious about, and I'm researching it to see if there's a photographic essay in it for me. If images don't start to come, I'll go to something else.
Years ago - in the 70s, for about a decade - I carried a camera every place I went. And I shot a lot of pictures that were still life and landscape, using available light.
For a period of time, I carried cameras with me wherever I went, and then I realized that my interest in photography was turning toward the conceptual. So I wasn't carrying around cameras shooting stuff, I was developing concepts about what I wanted to shoot. And then I'd get the camera angle and do the job.