In 2006, drawn to the immense scale of China and its development, Nadav Kander embarked on the project of photographing the Yangtze River, whose banks and waterways provide home and livelihood for hundreds of millions of Chinese. Taken along the river from its source in remote western China to its mouth just off the shores of Shanghai, these photographs depict the human footprint of habitat and industry that can be seen along the shores of China’s longest river.
Taken over a three-year period, Kander’s Yangtze River photographs speak of a China in the process of radical change, and of man’s futility and subjugation of the natural world in the pursuit of development. Following the course of China’s longest river upstream, Kander created a profound and contemplative body of pictures. Much like the Buddhist metaphor of a river itself, the photographs evoke a certain sense of the eternal and ephemeral, of man’s footprints amidst constant change and the flow of time. Documenting the effects of this change on the lives and traditions of the people who live in the river banks – in all, a population greater than that of the United States - resulted in this body of stunning photographic works which capture the timeless toil of man against nature, yet in an incredibly timely manner during a period of major upheaval along the Yangtze River. These photographs, however, go beyond documenting China’s relentless development, as they poetically allude to the fragility of our world and the damage humans may tend to inflict – damage that is not constrained by national boundaries. Kander is well aware that “this project was about us all, about our interrelatedness, and not just about China.”
In 2009, Kander’s “Yangtze, The Long River” series was awarded one of photography’s most respected international prizes, the Prix Pictet Photography Award. m97 Gallery exhibited a preview of the work in progress in 2007 and now resents the completed work for the first time in China. A clothbound 188-page monograph of the series has just been published by German publisher Hatje Cantz and will be available in the gallery.
