Laws are meant to be broken...or at least redefined. All the arts and their respective tools and instruments have falsely perceived instructions and limits, which reach a sublime level when surpassed beyond our expectations. The piano was designed for the mastery of Mozart, Beethoven and Bach but was transformed with Jazz. The structure and wit of the English language sings with Shakespeare but is dumbfounded by Joyce. The heaviness of sculpture was embraced by Rodin but made weightless by Calder. Photography, with the most specific, mechanical and literal of all devices in the arts, is perhaps one of the trickiest thresholds to traverse simply because most photographers are too involved with and conscious of the camera itself.

 

Kim Reierson, however, is a photographer who has reached the Jazz level in her art. Neither “embedded” nor “the fly on the wall”, she gets under the skin of her subjects and moves to their rhythm and she has not forgotten the magic of the dark room. This is not a technical remark but a comment about the feeling from her work that she has retained an emotional developing process. Never sentimental or romantic, Reierson is first and foremost a humanist. Her portrait series of Exotic World dancers in Helendale, California is perhaps the finest example of this quality. The Burlesque dancers come across as entertaining friends with good spirits instead of wayward seducers, which they might be reduced to by a male gaze. That's the power of the work and a credit to Reierson; for her ability to liberate the subject and control the reading by the viewer.