Nadav Kander is a Kentish Town-based photographer who is well known for his moody, atmospheric photographs. Scratch that, he’s the man behind some of my most beloved photographs of artists, such as David Lynch, Adam Pearson, Benicio Del Toro and other magnetic subjects, in which his photographic eye for light and darkness pulls powerful auras from the celebrity faces we have seen thousands of times. But now, Nadav’s new exhibition brings together three bodies of work: Dark Line, Colour Fields, and Treow – but these are not straight forwardly his great portraits, which Nadav once said “capture more than likeness”, but these are emotive landscape photographs that transform how we see and feel landscape photography. “I do not see a big divide between a portrait and a landscape that shows human intervention and/or human history,” says Nadav. “There is a landscape in the portrait and a portrait in the landscape.”
This much is true within Nadav’s photographs of trees, which he commonly superimposes on top of his famous portraits. Treow, the newest set of photographs in this trio, means not only tree in Old English, but also trust and promise (giving new meaning to the phrase “as strong as oak”). “How perfect as I, for a long time, have been photographing trees or including them in my landscapes,” says Nadav. “I only found the dormant tree, the sleeping giants, the tree waiting for renewal profound to me. There is a strength to their endurance, their age and a solid patience to their waiting.” Within these photographs of towering trees, Nadav reveals a human element within their prowess – their wrinkles, their age, their unique shapes – these photographs humanise the unbreakable promise of their presence. After all, oak trees are close relatives to humans.