NADAV KANDER
Beauty's Nothing
May 24 through July 7, 2001
Receptio for the Artist: Thursday,May 24, 7 - 9 p.m.
The Fahey/Klein Gallery is pleased to present the photographs of Nadav Kander in his first Los Angeles exhibition. The exhibition will include disconcerting explorations through genres diverse as portraiture, landscape, and still life from his recent publication Beauty's Nothing (Arena Editions).
Nadav Kander utilizes conventional black and white photography as well as rich color to produce his images. "Kander employs the seductive charm of aestheticism to expose our inconsistent response to the female nude, to probe questions of morality and desire in a series on Cuban prostitutes, and to manifest the fragile imbalances of the American landscape with its endlessly repeating artifice at the edge of vast emptiness." (Arena Editions)
"All of my pictures, the one's that have anything of me in them, tend to be quiet, still…I like the edge of oddness in my work: a simple but slightly jarred composition, a delicately surreal detail, a feeling of friction." Kander says of his work.
Concentrating his travels mainly in America, which Kander says has become the signifier for culture and identity, he searches for images that are both powerful and ordinary. "…there is no view left unphotographed, no spot where the footprint of the tripod has not left its mark…vantage points certain to secure an idyllic representation...their familiarity gives emphatic resonance to the power of these images…is about where you stand with the camera…" (Michael Mack, Arena Editions)
Kander's relationship with the image goes beyond the process of clicking the camera's shutter, it is also in the printing. "Taking pictures and printing have always been interlocked for me. I print everything including color. If someone else printed my work, it would be like reading three-quarters of a good book then giving it to a friend to finish it off for me. There's so much more you can do in the printing, often more than in the shoot," he says.
Kander was born in Israel and raised in South Africa. After serving in the South African Airforce he moved to London in the mid-eighties, where he still currently resides with his family. Receiving critical acclaim, his work has been exhibited in the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Royal Photographic Society.