Nadav Kander – Chongqing IV (Sunday Picnic), 2006

Nadav Kander’s photography explores a wide variety of genres and subjects — ranging from Obama’s People, a series of fifty-two colour portraits of the future President of the United States’s teams, to Dust, which documents the legacy of the Cold War through the radioactive ruins of secret towns on the border between Kazakhstan and Russia. What all his photographs have in common, however, is the notion of finding connections, “the only way we can live together as a species”, the artist says.

The Yangtze River, which impinges on both the spiritual and the material life of the Chinese people, runs from west to east for 6,300 km. It was the subject of Nadav Kander’s Yangtze — The Long River series. From the delta to its source, Kander photographed the landscapes, living spaces and inhabitants, before the completion of the Three Gorges Dam. As the images unfold, the Yangtze becomes a metaphor for the constant transformation of the country. A happy depiction of a Sunday lunch on the river bank, Chongqing IV (Sunday Picnic) shows the members of a family, as they go about their activity on the rubble of recently demolished dwellings, displaying a form of adaptation to environmental and societal upheaval.