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November 4, 2009
There is a portfolio of Nadav Kander's work from his Yangtze Long River project at the Pekin Fine Arts in Beijing. The London-based Kander photographed along the Yangtze River from its mouth to its source.
Nadav Kander, Shanghai1, C-Print, 2006, from 'Yangtze, From East to West'
It does seem that everybody is going to China to photograph the dramatic transformations taking place from industrialization. The work of Ferit Kuyas has been mentioned here on junk for code.
Kandar's artist statement gives the flavour of this body of work:
The Yangtze River, which forms the premise to this body of work, is the main artery that flows 4100miles across china, travelling from its furthest westerly point in Qinghai Province to Shanghai in the east. The river is embedded in the consciousness of the Chinese, even those who live thousands of miles from the river. It plays a pivotal role in both the spiritual and physical life of the people. More people live along its banks than live in the USA – one in every eighteen people on the planet.
The Yangtze is being dammed to provide hydro energy to help drive China's industrial machine that keeps Australia going through its ever increasing demand for iron ore.
Nadav Kander, Metal Palm, Nanjing, Jiangsu, C-Print, 2006, from 'Yangtze, From East to West'
The river has been transformed over the last twenty years as result of the controversial Three Gorges Dam, which has created a 600 kilometre reservoir, forcing relocation of up to four million residents as it turns nearby towns into modern cities. Kander continues:
Using the river as a metaphor for constant change, I have photographed the landscape and people along its banks from mouth to source. Importantly for me I worked intuitively, trying not to be influenced by what I already knew about the country. After several trips to different parts of the river, it became clear that what I was personally responding to, and how I felt whilst being in china, was permeating my pictures; a formalness and unease, a country that feels both at the beginning of a new era and at odds with itself. China is a nation that appears to be severing its roots by destroying its past by moving forward at such an astounding and unnatural pace. I felt a complete outsider and explained this pictorially by ‘stepping back’ and showing humans as small in their surroundings. Common man has little say in China’s progression, and this smallness of the individual is alluded to in the work.
It is is similar to the industrialization of capitalism that took place in the 19th century in Europe (England, France and Germany) that Marx wrote about in Capital, but on a much greater scale. China (and India) are only in the early stages of catching up with the living standards of the developed world, and this process has a very long way to run.
Nadav Kander, Chongqing X1, C-Print, 2006, from 'Yangtze, From East to West'
In its race to develop, the country's history is being lost. Kander continues:
I feel that there are strong parallels in China with the 20th Century immigrants who poured off the boats onto American soil, a new beginning without roots. Millions of domestic migrant workers are travelling from rural areas to the cities. This condition manifests itself throughout China’s social fabric and echoed my own feelings of dislocation. Further layers have been added to certain images by compositing single figures into a scene, twice removed from their natural habitat. Rather than looking to the future with hope, the photographic migrants appear in limbo, unable to observe their past at a time of uncertain future.
One world is going, another world is in formation. Modernity has arrived in China and the Yangtze is being devastated by industrial and agricultural pollution.
Nadav Kander, construction site, Chongqing C-Print, 2006, from 'Yangtze, From East to West'
Kander says that though it was never his intention to make documentary pictures, the sociological context of this project is very important and ever present.
The displacement of 3 million people in a 600km stretch of the River and the effect on humans when a country moves towards the future at pace are themes that will inevitably be present within the work.A Chinese friend I made whilst working on the project reiterated what many Chinese people feel: ‘Why do we have to destroy to develop?’ He explained that in Britain, many of us can revisit where we were brought up and it will be much the same, it will remind us of our families and upbringing. In China that is virtually impossible. The scale of development has left most places unrecognisable; “Nothing is the same. We can’t revisit where we came from because it no longer exists.”
Kander concludes that China is progressing rapidly, and the landscape – both economically and physically – is changing daily. These are photographs that can never be taken again.
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I see that Nadav Kander has been awarded the Prix Picteta photographic prize for environmental sustainability for his Yangtze Long River series. The short list included some big names in contemporary photography, including Edward Burtynsky, Andreas Gursky and Naoya Hatakeyma.