Stockland Martel

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Nadav Kander’s monograph Yangtze—The Long River, published this fall by art-book specialists Hatje Cantz and featuring an introduction by Kofi Annan, won a gold award last night at the German Photo Book Awards. Congratulations, Nadav!

Here are excerpts from a couple of reviews:

“Ultimately, Yangtze—The Long River is not so much a book about China at this particular point in time, it’s a book about us and what we are making out of this planet. It’s not a pretty sight,” wrote Joerg Colberg at his blog, Conscientious.

Writes Sean O’Hagan in his “On Photography” column for U.K. newspaper The Guardian: “The more Kander and his camera travel upstream, the more the Yangtze becomes a kind of phantom, passing though landscapes that seem dreamlike, either totally deserted or inhabited by one or two human figures who cling stubbornly to the remains of the old ways.”

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And here’s a snippet from an interview Nadav did with DiscoveryNews. In this excerpt from “Destroying to Develop: China’s Rise Along the Yangtze River: Big Pics,” the reporter notes that “not everyone in [China] is comfortable with the country’s ever-changing landscape” and goes on to quote Nadav:

“I met a man on a train, and he was very cross about it,” Kander said. “He said to me ‘you can go back to the (United Kingdom) and go back to the same place. It still feels the same and smells the same. But people here can’t go back to where we were,’ and I thought, ‘why do we have to destroy to develop?’”

An exhibition of Nadav’s Prix Pictet–winning series is currently traveling the globe and is now on view at the m97 Gallery in Shanghai. More details here.

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