Nadav Kander Exhibition: Dust review – haunting and painterly

At the first talk in the Photography Oxford Festival series there were a panel who put forward the view that there was no outlet for serious writing on photography in the UK. They of course completely missed the point that as in all areas, music, art, literature etc. now the venue is the web. Bloggers do for nothing what the ‘critics’ want to be paid for. Bloggers might not always be professors or experts but their views are valid, the democratisation of comment is now the norm. Even though this is the case I always find Sean O’Hagan in the Guardian a good read and this review of a new Nadev Kander exhibition at Flowers Gallery, London by Sean is on the button, it is long by web standards but worth the time, a short extract..

As shown in Nadav Kander’s new series, Dust, they possess a strange, sometimes eerie beauty that he captures in his signature style: large-format landscapes full of stillness and light that continue his visual exploration of what he calls “the aesthetics of destruction”……Kander thinks big. The size of his prints reflects his ambition as well as his acute understanding of scale and architectural eye for composition. In their beauty, though, they also accentuate the paradoxical nature of his approach: the rendering of the desolate sublime. In his catalogue essay, the novelist Will Self writes: “These images do not make beautiful what is not, they ask of us that we repurpose ourselves to accept a new order of both the beautiful and the real.” I am not entirely convinced by that claim. Digitally printed to a degree of verisimilitude that the darkroom could never produce, Kander’s images possess a hyper-real aspect that to me makes them seem oddly unreal...read it all here

try to get to London to see the exhibition, the website makes it all look very enticing

Nadav Kander: Dust is at the Flowers Gallery, London until until 11 October