Nadav Kander

Nadav Kander was born in Tel Aviv in 1961 to South African parents of Lithuanian-Jewish descent, and the family moved to Johannesburg when he was still a child. Growing up under apartheid, Kander developed an early awareness of the way power structures shape the visible world — who builds, who is displaced, whose presence is erased from the landscape. He took up photography as a teenager and, after completing military service in South Africa, moved to London in 1986, where he established himself first as a commercial and editorial photographer before turning increasingly to personal work that would place him among the most significant landscape and portrait photographers of his generation.

Kander's breakthrough as an art photographer came with Yangtze — The Long River, a project that occupied him from 2006 to 2008. Travelling the entire length of the Yangtze River from its mouth near Shanghai to its source in the Tibetan plateau, Kander produced a series of large-format photographs that documented a landscape in the midst of cataclysmic transformation. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric project in history, was displacing millions of people and drowning ancient cities beneath rising waters. Kander's images capture this upheaval with a palette of muted greys, ochres, and dusty blues, the scale of the construction dwarfing the human figures who labour amid the rubble.

What distinguishes Kander's Yangtze series from conventional documentary photography is its painterly quality and its refusal of journalistic directness. The images are suffused with a haze that evokes both the region's endemic pollution and the historical fog that envelops a civilisation in the process of remaking itself. Figures appear at the edges of vast construction sites, dwarfed by cranes and unfinished bridges, or stand on riverbanks surveying landscapes that will soon cease to exist. The effect is elegiac rather than polemical — Kander does not argue but observes, and the observation carries its own devastating weight.

In 2009, Kander achieved international recognition of a different kind when The New York Times Magazine commissioned him to photograph Barack Obama and his incoming administration. The resulting series, Obama's People, presented the new president and his team in austere, dramatically lit portraits that stripped away the polish of political image-making. Obama was photographed from behind, his face averted — a radical choice for a presidential portrait that spoke to Kander's interest in vulnerability and the limits of visibility. The series won the Prix Pictet in its inaugural year and established Kander as a portrait photographer of rare psychological insight.

Kander's subsequent landscape projects have continued to explore the intersection of power, history, and environmental transformation. Dust, produced between 2011 and 2015, documented the former Soviet nuclear test sites in Kazakhstan — landscapes scarred by hundreds of atomic detonations, where the earth itself bears the imprint of human destructive capacity. Photographed in muted tones against vast, empty skies, these images of cratered ground and abandoned structures possess an almost geological beauty, as though the violence done to the land has produced a new and terrible kind of sublime.

His body work series, Bodies. 6 Women. 1 Man., represented a departure into intimate territory. These large-scale photographs of human bodies, often contorted or partially obscured, treat flesh with the same attention to surface, texture, and light that Kander brings to landscapes. The bodies become terrains — sites of vulnerability, strength, and impermanence — and the series demonstrated the conceptual continuity that runs through all of Kander's work, whether his subject is a river valley, a nuclear test site, or the curve of a human spine.

Throughout his career, Kander has maintained a parallel practice in commercial and editorial photography that has included campaigns for major brands and portraits for publications worldwide. He has spoken openly about the relationship between his commercial and personal work, arguing that the discipline of commissioned photography sharpens the eye and that the two practices inform and enrich each other. His commercial portraits — of actors, politicians, musicians, and public figures — display the same painterly light and psychological attentiveness that characterise his art photography.

Kander's more recent work, including The Dark Line, a series documenting the Thames Estuary in England, continues his investigation of liminal landscapes — places where land meets water, where the natural and the industrial converge, and where the passage of time is inscribed in the textures of earth and sky. His photographs consistently ask what remains when power has passed, when the builders have moved on, when the water rises or recedes. The answer, rendered in his distinctive palette of muted, luminous tones, is always the same: the landscape endures, scarred but present, a record of everything that has been done to it and everything that will be done still.