for immediate release

The Full Body Project
Photographs by Leonard Nimoy

Foreword by Natalie Angier
Preface by Leonard Nimoy
Afterword by Anne Wilkes Tucker

Trade cloth in dustjacket | 10.75 inches x 8.25 inches 96 pp., | 50 B&W photographs | US $45.

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ISBN:978-0-9794727-2-5

In the preface to his provocative new book of nude studies, The Full Body Project, photographer and actor Leonard Nimoy writes, The average American woman weighs twenty-five percent more than the models wearing the clothes marketed to her. There is a huge industry built up around selling women ways to get their bodies closer to a fantasy ideal. The message is 'You don't look right. But if you buy our product, you can get there.

In The Full Body Project, Nimoy presents images of full-bodied women, many of whom are engaged in fat liberation and the size acceptance movement — and challenges dominant notions of the ideal female figure as represented in the media and fine arts. The women in these pages are proudly wearing their own skins. They accept and respect themselves, and I hope that my images convey that feeling to others. Leonard Nimoy

Leonard Nimoy, best known to the public as Spock in the Star Trek television and motion picture series, has been a lifelong photographer. Following his work on the Star Trek television series, he studied photography under Robert Heinecken at UCLA and since then has exhibited his work widely, in addition to lecturing on photography and contemporary art. His photographs are in numerous private and museum collections. A previous book of his photographs, Shekhina, was published in 2002.

Five Ties Publishing produces high-quality books on photography, fine art, film, architecture, and graphic design in collaboration with emerging and internationally renowned artists and writers. Five Ties founder Garrett White is the former director of publications at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

A great list, inspiring, challenging, informative, entertaining, can only be built from a strong vision and a willingness to take risks beyond the need for high volume and pre-established commercial appeal. Garrett White

From the Foreword by Natalie Angier:
The women in [these] photographs seize the aesthetic and emotional reins through the time-honored primate strategy called making direct eye contact. In most artistic renditions of the nude, the subject's gaze is indirect . . . But the women shown here do not avert their eyes, either from the camera or from each other. They look us straight in the face and ask thatwe do the same. Significantly, their gaze is not hostile or defiant. It doesn't say, what are you staring at, chum? Does my fat body repel you? Nor is it campy or vampy or in the least bit embarrassed. Instead, it is the gaze of gimlet-eyed women who know perfectly well that they are on view, and that their unclothed bodies are not the standard models of beauty as brought to you by museums, the movies, or Maybelline. Yet by fixing us in their level-headed sight, the women politely but firmly demand that we begin our inspection at eye level, where the self is exposed and makes its humanness known. We get to know these women before we begin appraising their bodies. And the paradoxical result of our face-based introduction, our feeling that we understand these women as individuals and already count them as friends, is that we see their bodies less personally,relieved of any object lessons or projections of our private pieties and fears. Rather than rejecting their bodies as unacceptably obese . . . we see them almost as abstractions, an interplay of geometries, patterns, and themes. We can see them for what they are, for what every body must be: an imperfect, magnificent evolutionary compromise between the life forms that preceded it, and the life forms yet to be.