W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #nadavkander, #thames 

Nadav Kander is dauntingly good photographer shooting portraits and landscape, working for himself and commercially.  And he is a lovely man.  

Our encounters are meaningful because he has such depth as a human.  That all shows in the photographs too.  I respond to his need for solitariness as expressed in the work.  His locations take him to the Yangtze River to remote Soviet Nuclear Sites to the US desert and invariably to the studio.  

Even in his portraits, Kander invites the sitter into a place where one can be quiet and private.  It isn’t necessary for there to be a conversation, actual or implied, between the photographer and the subject.  Often there is an air of apprehension.

In a video “'Making Pictures is Exploring Life’” he remarks that he seeks making “nourishing, abstract work”.*1  He uses “light to reveal — or the opposite of reveal — with my subjects how they are feeling or how I feel”. *2

In the seascape above, it is difficult to know if these choppy waters make for a dangerous place.  Are these hard to navigate?  All the natural elements are foreboding.  Even the tight verticality is claustrophobic.  

“When alone, there is nowhere I’d rather be than beside large bodies of slow-moving water.  I feel myself quiet and alive as emotions come and go.  Traveling to the estuary in the dark, and often alone, and returning home at nightfall has affected how I see this place — at as a geographical landscape, but at a mystical space, somehow other worldly and full of intrigue”.*3

Kander may travel to and in the spaces between, but it is an attempt to communicate.  “I always think about the viewer more than I do the sitter, I think when you’re working in this domain it’s all about the visitors reacting to a photograph.  So it becomes a triangle; you have your sitter, you have your photographers or artist and you have the viewer, and that viewer is really really important”. *4

*1 “Nadav Kander: 'Making Pictures is Exploring Life’”, Christies: Artist Nadav Kander Studio Visit, 2016*1

*2 “Road to 2012: Aiming High - Nadav Kander”,

*3 The Guardian, 05 March 2019 gallery”

*4 “Road to 2012: Aiming High - Nadav Kander”, National Portrait Gallery

©2021

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