Apart from the photographs themselves and the title of the book, Nadav Kander gives no help to the reader in working out what he is trying to accomplish with his work. There’s a short paragraph on the inner sleeve of the book jacket and there’s a brief essay by writer Michael Mack, but these are unhelpful. Included in this book are works of 8 other writers that are inspired by Kander’s images, but they are obscure.

The pictures are varied. Early on in the book, there are seedy rooms and naked women, presumably sex workers. They look tired and dejected. In many of the pictures, the TV is on. In a different series, women face the camera with a white wall behind them. The most arresting images of the book are of shirtless middle aged men against a white background — they look intense and troubled. He moves on to close ups of faces, again showing imperfections and worries. He uses contrasts between young and old, or with naked women with one breast removed, between left and right. He shows the wrinkles of old skin, and then the smooth softness of young skin. Then some women lying down, now their heads out of the picture. Then seascapes and beaches. Bullet shells lying on caked dry mud. Empty roads in flat landscapes. A littered car lot with mountains in the background. Plastic reindeer on browning grass. A collapsed wooded shed. Nighttime shots of a gas station and shopping carts lined up against a wall.

If there’s a common thread here, it is something to do with unexpected ways of seeing. Kander’s refusal to add contextual information about his subjects drains political or social meaning from his pictures, although it leaves space available for the viewer to bring his or her own interpretation. While these images are primarily aesthetic as they appear in the book, they could very easily be turned into strong political statements.

Take for example "Under Manhattan Bridge, New York 1996" (pp. 134-135), a black and white photograph in fine grain. In the background in the mist are the signs of wealth of New York City, the twin towers and Wall Street. In the center of the picture is the bridge, presumably a feat of early twentieth industry. It is sturdy and dark — beautiful in its strength. Under the bridge are three boys, maybe in their teens. The ground looks like a abandoned building site, with trash and concrete blocks and some tire tracks. The boys are wearing shorts, baggy T-shirts and sneakers; two of them are sitting on a concrete block, while the third is standing on another block, bouncing a soccer ball in the air, presumably using his forehead. On the right, a young tree is growing out of the dirt — it looks very windblown. It would be easy to interpret the image as a statement about inner city poverty, the lack of play space for children, the impersonal nature of modern cities, and desolation. It’s also possible to interpret the picture as a study in contrasts between the personal and the impersonal, nature and artifice, or it could even be about Kander’s love of bridges leading to Manhattan. If the boys were wearing the right kind of shoes, it could be used as an advertisement for Adidas. While the picture is not pretty, it has a stark beauty.

Nearly all of Kander’s images have this sort of open-endedness, combined with drama, a sense of absurdity, and humor. One might see his work as a commentary on modern life, focusing on the faultlines in the social geography of contemporary north America. Really though, Kander is most interested in pleasure in visual detail, and that’s what he does best. He is not a documenter of the sights that normally get classified as aesthetically pleasing (sunsets and supermodels) but, nevertheless, in his own peculiar way, beauty is everything.

© 2001 Christian Perring. First Serial Rights.

Links:

Publisher’s web page for this book.

Beauty’s Nothing at Nerve.com

Categories: General, artandphotography