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Photography is a difficult and beguiling medium. On the one hand it is deceptive, full of untruths, contradictions and artifices. On the other, it is a powerful means of expression, a way to begin to make sense of the world and what it means to be alive.
All of this Nadav Kander knows and has long known, since at least the earliest days of his image-making career. His has a deep understanding of how to utilise photography’s infinitely complex qualities to create works that resonate in the viewer’s mind long after they have turned away. One has only to look at the hazy dreamlike human-altered landscapes of God’s Country (1995 - 2007) where the natural sense of scale appears warped – is this reality we are looking at, and if so, what kind? – or to the abstracted, disorientating realities in Signs That We Exist (1996 – 2018) with their suggestion of human presence, or at the filmic The Parade (2002) where mini dramas are glimpsed through windows and the viewer is invited to imagine who the protagonists are, the lives they lead, their loves, losses, hopes and fears. Dip into Kander’s oeuvre at any point and you will encounter a work that grapples with life’s most vital areas of enquiry, from the nature of reality, truth, solitude and time, to the fleetingness and fragility of existence, the inevitability of death and what might lie beyond.
In his latest series, The Pause, a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Kander continues along a familiar path, tapping into the grey area between what is real and what is not, at the same time confronting and mining his own thoughts and feelings towards the strange new reality in which the world finds itself. Themes such as isolation or aloneness, disconnection and loneliness are brought to the fore, pondered and probed, in a body of work that is as much about universal experience as it is about one man’s emotional state.
At a glance, the figures appear to be alive, humans made miniscule by the artist’s hand, reminiscent of those in the acclaimed Yangtze – The Long River (2006 – 2007), which was awarded the Prix Pictet in 2009. A closer look shows them to be figurines, devoid of life and therefore incapable of feeling. Yet somehow amid the expansive, otherworldly vistas they become expressive, contemplative, and in turn inspire us to ponder the state of things – where we have come from and to where we might be going.
In these images, stripped back to only their most essential elements, Kander places his actors in dialogue with time, space and ultimately life (and death) itself. The figures seem to be on the cusp of understanding, of connecting with a deeper truth; there is a sense that change or perhaps enlightenment is within touching distance and yet just out of reach. It is as though we are “looking into the cosmos, wondering how we need to change,” Kander has commented (the change on one level being the need for humans to right the imbalance with the natural world).
We might speculate that The Pause is about confronting the very human fear of death or what it means to be alone on a journey leading to the end, but as is true of all of Kander’s work there is never bleakness without hope, or melancholy without beauty. Indeed, The Pause is as much about the possibility of something better and greater than ourselves, something transcendental, as it is about the acceptance of mortality.
Ultimately, The Pause is the latest strand to be added to the central thread that runs through all of Kander’s work, a coming together of many years of ideas and explorations, feelings and convictions, always with an existential bent. Indeed, if Kander has resolutely journeyed along one road since he began making photographs as a child, his sense of purpose is as strong as ever. Everything he does is part of one feeling, one overarching drive, that is, a “subconscious need to express what feels meaningful and profound”. He may with this work be “coming from a different direction, but I am still, I feel, hitting the same notes I’m always hitting, […] It’s the same longing”.
Gemma Padley, May 2021