Nadav Kander is a London-based photographer, artist and also director, well-known for his portraiture and landscapes. Kander began his photography journey at the mere age of 13 on a Pentax camera that he had bought with money received from his Bah Mitzvah. Kander has produced a number of books; had his work exhibited widely; he received an Honorary Fellowship from the Royal Photographic Society in 2015, won the Prix Pictet and a World Press Photo award, and his work is included in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and other museums and galleries.
Nadav Kander has photograped many celebrities, including Barack Obama or David Lynch, notably for covers of the New York Times Magazine, but he is also known for his book Yangtze – The Long River, for which he earned the Pictet Prize. The river in these images the river serves as a metaphor and Kander will usually give his work a depth just as he did with this photo. Another example of this was his interest in “aesthetics of destruction”. Kander’s project intitled “Dust” explores the vestiges of the Cold War through the radioactive ruins of secret cities on the border between Kazakhstan and Russia. These images do not make beautiful what is not, they ask of us that we repurpose ourselves to accept a new order of both the beautiful and the real. Kander also claims that the pictures that he took in his beginnings, although unaccomplished, have the same sense of quiet and unease that is part of his work today.
