Nimoy became enamored of photography when he was 13 and living in a tenement apartment in Boston -- six people (three generations), two bedrooms and one bathroom. A neighbor showed him how to develop a roll of film in a darkroom, and Nimoy started doing it in his bathroom -- as relatives banged on the door to get in.

He eventually got busy boldly going where no man had gone before. But after three seasons of "Star Trek" (yes, only three seasons, from fall 1966 to summer 1969) and two of "Mission: Impossible," he studied photography at UCLA under Robert Heinecken. He discovered that he enjoyed conceptual work.

"I'm not interested in photojournalism. I'm not interested in fashion or commercial photography," he says. "But when I develop a concept, an idea, that I want to work on photographically, then it becomes very passionate for me and very enthralling. And I have spent sometimes three, four or five years on one of these projects following it through."

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. “During the day I would switch back to living the life of a male,” she explained at Mr. Michelson’s gallery, joking that she was Clark Kent during the daytime and Rita Hayworth at night.

“I had been wanting to fully transition for years but couldn’t figure out how to make the change,” she went on. “Mr. Nimoy was very blunt and straightforward. He sort of whittled things down, trying to get a sense of who I am, and at one point he asked, ‘How do you do it?’ I was stumped. No one had ever asked me that before. How do you do that? And a week or two after meeting him I decided to fully transition. I became much more relaxed, and it seemed like everything was a lot simpler.”

AVC: So the way they presented themselves—their image, the costumes, and all of that—it was entirely their choice?

LN: Oh, yeah. They all came with their own story. Each of them had written a brief statement about who they were in their obvious daily lives, and what their hidden or secret fantasy self was all about. They came with their own wardrobe and their own props or whatever.

AVC: Some of their self-conceptions were so ambitious that I had to wonder if they came prepared with all of it, or they worked it out with you in advance.

LN: No, you’re right. And it’s not only ambitious, it’s very generous. They came fully loaded. [Laughs.] I had no idea what to expect! We explained what we were after, and the whole thing could have been a total dud, but these people walked in, and really, it was a very powerful experience—at turns very funny, and at times very touching. It was really quite extraordinary.

AVC: So you didn’t find you had to coax anything out of people to reveal their secret selves?

LN: Of the 95, there were a handful who didn't’t really know how to go about doing this. They just wanted to come in and have their pictures taken, you know. [Laughs.] But only a handful. The vast majority, by and large, came with very strong ideas about what their other hidden, or fantasy, selves were all about.

“[The subjects] came in extremely generous and ready to make themselves vulnerable and transparent,’’ recalls Nimoy. The morning Nimoy and his wife checked out of their Northampton hotel, the photographer says, “several of these people had gathered, waiting for us. They had been talking among themselves about the experience, and they wanted to talk more. They asked, ‘Would you join us?’ ’’ But the Nimoys had to decline. They had a plane to catch.

Regarding Leonard Nimoy's retirement, "Leonard has now retired twice. He's our Brett Favre," says Pinkner. They talked him through his story and he said he'd come back for Season 2. "He was initially nervous that we just wanted him for promotional value, but we wanted to give him sort of a swan song role." Should Nimoy come out of retirement, they will have more stories to tell.

The work marks some major aesthetic departures for Nimoy -- it is his first using a digital camera, his first color series and the first to include men as subjects, as well as some other changes in the technical side. Nimoy says the techniques employed were all about the subjects in the photos and not his own personal whims.

"The nature of the project demanded color," he said during a telephone interview last week. "It demanded a total presentation of whatever these people brought to the session. The black and white would have done them an injustice, I think. It would have eliminated or discriminated against a lot of what was happening in front of the camera. Black and white makes its own comment, which I enjoy very much in certain situations, but in this particular situation, it was very clear to me that we had to see -- if you’ll pardon the pun -- the colorful aspects of these people. So I went to color."

The fourth is a play about friendship with six women over 60. American actor Leonard Nimoy and his wife, Susan, commissioned it after they staged his one-woman play about Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's Will, in Los Angeles.

The costume, which was used in the second Star Trek film through to the seventh, is labelled 'Spock/Nimoy'.

Gimpl, the Fool. Leonard Nimoy's masterful interpretation of one of Nobel Laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer's greatest stories. Though he appears simple-minded, Gimpel is a powerful character who plays the fool in the face of his wife's infidelities and his neighbors' derision.