The online photo, art, media, and culture magazine Lens Culture recorded a video interview with Nadav in Paris about his award-winning series “Yangtze: The Long River”—what inspired the project, what he wanted to express with it, and how the project evolved as he worked on it. Nadav, who worked on the series for three years, explains that he became interested in doing a series on the Yangtze after reading newspaper articles and particularly a book by Simon Winchester called The River at the Center of the World, which noted that more people live along the Yangtze than live in the U.S. in total. “The river was such a perfect metaphor for change,” Nadav says in the interview.
Photographers all have their own approaches to their personal projects, with some preferring to map things out in precise detail ahead of time, others choosing to wing it, and still other photographers inclined to research their subject and form a theory that they then go and explore. Explore is the key word here. It means remaining open to photographic and thematic possibilities that you might not have planned on. With “Yangtze,” Nadav was in this last camp, going into his project with clear ideas but allowing himself to be free within them and what he might encounter. In fact, as he tells Lens Culture, on his first trip to the Yangtze, he made “intimate portraits” indoors and out. But he recognized that he was just at the beginning of a discovery process.
“Only on my second trip did I start to realize that what was working better for me was when I stepped back and became more voyeuristic—when I acted the outsider that was I actually very much feeling in China,” he says. “I really believe if I had done one trip…two months, three months later, I would have returned with a very National Geographic, Life set of pictures.”
To see a selection of Nadav’s “Yangtze” photographs, along with text by him, click here. And to watch the video interview, click here or on the image below.
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Click on the image to view Lens Culture's video interview with Nadav Kander.
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