Interview by Guenola Pellen. Please click here to view the full article.

Your work often documents the scars of the modern world, landscapes wounded by history. Do you think photography has a particular role in revealing this shadow side?

Nadav Kander: I don't think it's particular to photography. I think it's particular to the artist. If I was a painter, I would also be photographing things that feel like the shadow side, the darker side of human beings. I don't really think about it. It's just very much in my psyche. It's something I recognize. And it's something that I crave my work to tickle in a viewer, to scratch in a viewer, to frustrate a viewer.

You travel alone to the Thames "in the dark, returning at nightfall". What are you seeking in the darkness?

Recently, thinking about darkness because of the title of the show, "After Dark", I looked to Greek mythology and found the goddess called Nyx. The thing that really struck me is that she is born out of chaos, the chaos of daytime. Nighttime shrouds everything in blackness. Those pictures are only available because of man's invention of electric light. For me, they feel incredibly calm and quite frightening in that they drift into blackness, like going in the ocean with goggles and looking towards the depths. It's a metaphor for the unknown.

What draws you specifically to the Estuary?

When I first went there, I found this very bleak river. But its history is unbelievable. For better or worse, England was a very important country for many years. The amount of trade and voyages of discovery, love, and death that has gone on on that river, it's almost in the silt in the sand of the river.

How do you translate this historical weight into your photographs?

The pictures I made had to feel like that. I had to remember that to take pictures like I wanted to take. When I would print them in my darkroom, I had to be feeling that to make works that felt like the endless generations before. That nature and our cosmos is much bigger than us. That's why they're that shape, because they're the same shape as the Shanshui scroll, the Chinese and Japanese way of depicting man as very small with nature and the stars almighty.

Why do you photograph at night rather than during the day?

I would go there at night because if I went in the day, I would have the traffic, the builders. I used to go at night so that I would arrive on the water before the world had woken up, and it remained mystical.

You switched to photographic etching with your "Treow" series. What does this physical method bring you?

I used to photograph on a beautiful Linhof camera, which was totally manual. I'm the person that likes mechanical things - the gears on a bicycle, a beautiful mechanical camera. As the digital world is more in my life, there's something I missed, which was the object. Photography is an object I've always struggled with. The texture and objectivity of painting or sculpture is more than photography. Photography is quite thin and flat and not that nice to touch anymore.

How do these etchings change your relationship to the work?

These are beautiful objects. The photographic etchings use a 600-year-old or 1,000-year-old process that is totally mechanical, which I find beautiful. I've returned to making an object, and I love it. I am really interested in how the objectivity, which feels quite ancient, can also be really modern. So the choice of picture is important.

Your tree photographs seem very peaceful, as if they had been waiting forever. How would you describe your relationship with them?

A few years ago, I would have said the only landscapes I ever make are showing the palm print of humankind, like the Yangtze River series. But with the "Treow" project, which I started during lockdown, comes more out of the solidity and trustworthiness of trees. We all feel a deep sense of loss when we see a tree cut down, especially an old tree, in the same way as we feel empathy for an elephant who's died.

What's the significance of the word "Treow"?

When I looked up the word tree in Old English and found it was called Treow, and Treow was exactly the same word for promise and for trust, I was just amazed. But I'd also say that my trees are either photographed at nighttime or trees that are not in leaf. They're always dormant, waiting. There's always that same feeling I like of a hinting at death, a hint at the inevitable. My trees are without leaf. My trees are in winter. They are waiting to be renewed again, patiently.

Are you trying to capture time passing, or a sense of memory through these cycles?

I say death, but maybe it's renewal or cycle, like the tides. The tide goes down, the tide comes up. A child is born, a person dies. Everything is in a cycle. And I find the cycles incredibly consoling. If you can be in nature, if you can be with the moon cycles, if you can be with the tides of water, I think one's nervous system can really calm and be trustworthy of life around us.

In that spirit, your trees seem to offer a counter-model to the modern, capitalistic world ...

Absolutely. There is no doubt one's anxiousness levels drop down when walking amongst nature. It's where we belong. My trees are hinting at ends of life, but yet trees do that. They drop their leaves, they come back. They are more like the cycles of the moon or the tides than maybe we are.

You mention that art becomes the viewer's when they look at it. What do you mean by that?

I think that art is about the viewer's emotion. And emotion comes from the subconscious, not the brain. My art is not my art when you look at it. I might have made it, but it becomes yours.

You said the Thames seemed "exhausted by the weight of London's history". How do you render this accumulated memory?

Photography struggles because of an age-old projection that it is always recording an event, something happening in front of it, while all human beings realize that the person who reads a poem takes their own meaning. We always think that the meaning in a photograph is there to be seen. If I feel that history while I make the work, not only the click, but everything leading up to that click and everything after that click in my studio or darkroom, then I'm doing the same work as a poet would do. Or that a Rothko or a Barnett Newman would do.

Your editing process involves lengthy exposures and overprinting. Why do you insist on slowness?

Right since the beginning, my pictures have always felt quiet, alone, maybe slow. How I describe any estuary is the end of a journey, the coming to terms with being absorbed into the next thing. Maybe the ocean or maybe to be evaporated and become a cloud and start again. But it's the ending. A river flows slower in the estuary. It quietens down, it widens out. All those things I notice because that's my personality.

How does this slowness translate into your studio practice?

When I make the work, the music I listen to, the time of day - always in my studio at 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning - everything is about it being quiet and slow. For me, the slowness of work means that it doesn't matter if a photograph was taken at 5:56 on the sixth of September. It could be a long time period that could have been made, which is also why I love the lengthy exposures. It's almost anti-photography, this idea of collapsing a long period of time onto a piece of film.

What does this approach bring to your relationship with art?

All of those things just make me feel humble and abstract, which is a world that I love art to live in. If I look at it, what I'm looking at is not what I'm seeing. It's something that is underneath that comes into view. It's like what you are seeing comes from within you rather than just what you are looking at.