Leonard Nimoy’s photographs of fat, naked women changed my life
But it’s one particular area of Nimoy’s art and activism that, for me, transcended appreciation and actually changed my life, and I’m surprised by how few people in my circle know about it. In 2007, Nimoy published a collection of photographs he titled The Full Body Project. The photos are in black and white, and they feature a group of women laughing, smiling, embracing, gazing fearlessly into the camera. In one, they sway indolently like the Three Graces; in another they recreate Herb Ritts’s iconic pile of supermodels. The women are naked, and the women are fat.
When Nimoy’s photos took their first brief viral trip around the internet, I clicked, I skimmed, I shrugged, I clicked away.
I clicked back.
I couldn’t stop looking. It was the first time in my life – I realise in retrospect – that I’d seen bodies like mine honoured instead of lampooned, presented with dignity instead of scorn, displayed as objects of beauty instead of as punchlines. It feels bizarre to put myself back in that headspace now (and even more bizarre to register just how recent it was), but looking at Nimoy’s photographs was my very first exposure to the concept that my body was just as deserving of autonomy and respect as any thin body. Not only that, but my bigness is powerful.
Up until that point, I conceived of myself as an unfinished thing – a life suspended until I could fix what was wrong with me. It’s how fat people are conditioned to feel: you’re not a person, you’re a before picture. You have no present and no future; you’re trapped for ever in a shameful past. As a woman, the shame is compounded, because women have an aesthetic duty, too.
More at link.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/commentisfree/2015/mar/03/leonard-nimoy-full-body-project
The Full Body Project
http://www.rmichelson.com/artist_pages/nimoy/pages/MaxBeaut.htm
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