TO BOLDLY GO.(The Talk of the Town;actor Leonard Nimoy's photo exhibit "Maximum Beauty" )(Interview)

An unflinchingly critical review of Kirstie Alley's show "Fat Actress" was delivered from an unexpected quarter recently: the desk of Leonard Nimoy, who described the program as "ghastly" and "hypocritical." "Have you seen it?" Nimoy asked, speaking by phone from his Los Angeles home. "She trumpets the fact that she is a fat actress and shows herself very glamorously posed and so on; but then the first thing you see is her crying and wailing and pounding on the floor and swearing, while guzzling food and talking about losing weight. The message that she is sending is, on the one hand, I am fat and it's O.K., and, on the other hand, it is just terrible. The taste is awful, awful, awful; and so is the level of humor, if you can call it that."

Nimoy and Alley have, as it turns out, a special bond: Alley made her acting debut in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan," which was released in 1982. She played Lieutenant Saavik, a half-Vulcan cadet whom Spock had mentored at the Starfleet Academy. Nimoy's interest in Alley's latest project, however, springs not from lingering issues of intergalactic kinship but from the fact that he has recently been making his own artistic statements about what he refers to as "full-bodied people." Nimoy, who is seventy-four and has been exhibiting his fine-art photography since the early seventies, has a show up at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery, in New York, entitled "Maximum Beauty," which includes a handful of group portraits of nudes whose proportions are considerably more ample than Kirstie Alley's.

The idea for "Maximum Beauty," Nimoy explained, came when he was showing some work at a photography seminar. "I had been working on female figures for a number of years, and a lady approached me and said, 'Your work seems to deal with mostly a particular body type,' " he said. "She was about three hundred pounds--a very large lady, a very lovely lady, and she came to our studio and we photographed her." The resulting shots--in which the model's face is partially veiled, though her marmoreal mass is not--are not in the show, which consists of a series of images Nimoy took of members of a burlesque troupe in San ...