‘Star Trek’ Actor Leonard Nimoy Debuts Photography Exhibit

Leonard Nimoy is most famous for his portrayal of Spock, the pointy-eared, half-Vulcan science officer on the Starship Enterprise, on Star Trek. However, it’s an image he’s wanted to escape for a long time. Indeed, the actor even published a book entitled I Am Not Spock, but the persona has proved hard to shed.

Still, Nimoy hopes that people can see beyond Spock in his new photography exhibit, entitled Secret Selves, that opens Saturday at Mass MoCA. In fact, Nimoy has been an accomplished photographer for nearly as long as he’s been Spock, and his work has been collected by several museums.

Secret Selves contains 26 color photographs, 11 of them life size, and is Nimoy’s first solo show at a major museum, reports The New York Times.

Nimoy says that he got the idea for it from the passage in Plato’s Symposium speculating that humans were originally double-sided creatures, split apart by jealous gods and doomed forever to seek their lost other halves.

Therefore, over a couple of days in 2008, Nimoy photographed 95 or so residents of nearby Northampton, Mass., who had been encouraged to reveal their hidden natures any way they chose.

“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,” Nimoy said of the exhibit. “Are you kidding? I’ve had 60 years of acting out my other selves. Been there, done that. I’ve been the good guy, the bad guy, the psycho, the alien. I’ve done it all. They’re all out there.”