His name is Kim Taylor Reece.

CW: When and where were you born?
KTR: I was born in California in 1947, and raised in a little beach town south of Long Beach – Belmont Shore.

CW: Tell me a little about your family.
KTR: I'm the oldest of five kids – two brothers and two sisters. My father was a law professor and my mother was a housewife.

CW: Were you aware of art or photography as a child?
KTR: My dad always wanted to be an artist, and he painted and did sculptures. It was my mother that encouraged art in the family, though. We had a lot of books around, and studied art. She encouraged that from the time I was a little kid.

CW: You said you attended college at San Jose State. Is that where you got your degree?
KTR: That's where I graduated. I changed schools, and actually changed majors from art to advertising, because I was colorblind. My professors didn't think art was a good major for me. [They said] I would probably end up being a starving artist.

CW: How did you end up in Hawai`i?
KTR: My brother was over here with a girlfriend, surfing. I minored in psychology, and had been working in Stanford at El Camino Hospital in a psychiatric unit. I wanted to get back into my major. My brother said "Why don't you come over and try this out for a year?" That was over 20 years ago. I just never went back.

CW: What year was that?
KTR: I think it was 1976. I moved over with one container of furniture and $500 in my pocket.

CW: How did you get started as a photographer?
KTR: When I worked for Island Life magazine, I was shooting images of people working. I ran into a band from Hawai`ian Airlines with a couple of dancers, performing on Fort Street Mall. The first hula dancer I photographed was performing in those shots.

After I'd been doing this for about 10 years, I noticed that the dancer in Fort Street Mall was the same dancer that was in "Hula Kahiko"! "Hula Kahiko" was one of the first photos I published in 1985, and it became really popular. That's how the business went. Once I published a couple of photos, it took off and had a life of its own!

CW: Who are your favorite models, and why?
KTR: It changes all the time. There's one dancer that I worked with a few years ago named Lauren. She was able to project an emotion that was really strong. In pictures, she looked bigger than life. You wouldn't know that she was 5'1" and probably weighed under 100 lb.

Another dancer I really enjoy working with is Rachel Berman. She spent 10 years with the Paul Taylor Dancers in New York. She can fly! She's amazing. When she takes off across the sand, she can get four feet off the ground with her legs horizontal, above the horizon.

For the last 20 years I keep returning to the hula. There's something that's basic and primal, so rooted in Hawai`i and the culture and the land. It draws me back. What I wanted to be able to do, when I first started seeing ancient hula, was to be able to share that strength, that emotion, with other people.

When I started in the late '70s, Frank Hewett, who was a kumu hula, started bringing out the kahiko hula that had been banned in Hawai`i for years. I went to a couple things at I`olani Palace and saw his halau perform. It was right at the beginning, and he was really controversial. I just locked into that feeling. What he did changed hula. I hadn't seen anything like that before.

I worked with five or six different hula halau for a year or two; I would do whatever they did, go to their practices and performances… I got a feeling for the way different kumu would teach ancient hula.

CW: You've photographed musicians for record covers… You're going to be shooting Na Leo Pilimehana soon, right?
KTR: I worked with them on their first album, before they signed with Sony. Next week I'm working with them on the new album. I've also worked with Natural Vibration, which I really enjoy. Oh – and Robi Kahakalau, the one where she has a lauhala top. When I work with entertainers, I always have a good time! I do that with the dancers, too, but it's so concentrated and serious, you don't get to laugh and joke like with the musicians.

CW: Are you your own stylist?
KTR: Normally, yeah. Kanoe, my wife, works with me a lot. Often when I'm photographing a hula dancer, I'm looking at the shadows on the mountains, the clouds, the waves, the composition. She'll look at the details to let me know that their hair's in their face or their lei's flying around, and she'll have me stop shooting.

I usually don't work with a lot of lights or reflectors or anything like that. It's normally just the camera. I don't bring in a big entourage.

CW: You've published two books, Hula Kahiko and Wahine. What can you tell me about them?
KTR: Wahine was done in 1999 and Hula was done in '97. It took me ten years to put Hula together. There's a book binder on the Big Island named Jesus Sanchez; he used to [work] for the Vatican. He made me a koa-covered book with handmade paper that he had bound himself. I had been going out with Kanoe for three or four years and she saw the thing sitting in a box. She was able to run the business so I could take three months and concentrate on the book.

When I did Wahine, I had about 8 or 10 years of work. Because I had done Hula first, we were able to compile the whole thing in three weeks instead of three months.

CW: What are your hobbies?
KTR: I just really like to shoot pictures! I like to travel, which I've been getting to do a lot of since I met Kanoe. She's pretty amazing as far as being organized and making things happen. We've been married for about two years, but together for about six. She's a former elementary school teacher, so she's trained to herd cats! I read an article by Carl Reiner; he said if he didn't have his wife, he wouldn't have accomplished all the stuff that he did. I thought, 'Maybe I should stop resisting.'

CW: You shoot a lot of nudes now – at least, it seems like there are a lot on your Web site. What started this trend?
KTR: Our Web page guy really liked the Wahine book, put the entire thing on the website, and then forgot to put the stuff from the Hula book in. I really need to redesign it.

A lot of the Hula Kahiko stuff that I was doing is topless. I tried to stay true to form to the drawings and paintings from Captain Cook's crew in the Bishop Museum. That was just an aspect of the dance and of the culture. The Sistine Chapel has over 300 nudes on the ceilings, not counting cherubs!

Our biggest market for [Wahine] is women. They buy it for their husbands for Valentine's Day or birthdays. The women see that I didn't turn them into an object. And all of the models that I've worked with are natural; they're not enhanced.

CW: You'll be going to Europe this year. What will you do when you're there?
KTR: Kanoe and I are going to be drawing for four weeks in Italy. Then I have a photography show in Germany. After that, we're probably going to spend a week up in Paris… and I may stay there and be a street artist and never come back. I'm joking!

CW: I want to know a little more about your sketching.
KTR: We take a drawing class on weekends at the Kailua Racquet Club. I originally started doing photos of the dancers so I could draw and paint them. The camera turned into a paintbrush. Now, I've gone back to sketching and painting.

CW: What media do you use?
KTR: Pencil and charcoal, a little bit of pastels. When I paint, I like acrylics. Oil is such a subtle medium if you're trying to mix colors - and if you're colorblind, it's a lot harder.

CW: Is that why all your photography is black and white?
KTR: Partly… and I really like the feeling of the composition. You don't get distracted by the orange flower in the corner of the picture. It makes you focus.

CW: Do you think that you've found respect for your work among hula purists and Hawai`ians?
KTR: Yeah, I think I have… and it was difficult. I think they wanted to see that I was going to give this dance the respect that it needs. In the early days I definitely did have to walk on fire to make sure everybody knew I wasn't gonna take it and make a mockery of it.

Occasionally there's still somebody out there, I'm sure, saying, 'Yeah, that guy – whatEVER.' I just concentrate on what I'm doing. Being able to share [my art] with other people is really important to me.

CW: What is your favorite photograph?
KTR: I have two of them. There's one of a male dancer named Dick Mosher who passed away a couple years ago, where he is TOTALLY up off the ground on one leg with an arm stretched up. very powerful. It's difficult to get a good, strong image of the male dancer.

The other favorite is called "Kikila". It's the dancer Lauren, doing a dance about the legends of Pele. This particular move illustrates the devastation of her sister's ohia lehua groves. It's a real strong image. I tend to go towards the more dynamic for my personal taste than the softer, tamer ones. They can be disturbing, way too strong to hang in a hotel lobby. You wouldn't want to introduce somebody from Iowa to hula with an image like that!

Visit Kim Taylor Reece online, at www.kimtaylorreece.com.