Nadav Kander - Obama's People

I have just read an interview with Nadav Kander published 3 years ago just after his set of portaits "Obama's People" appeared in the New York Times. I found this article in an old RPS Journal (June 2009) that someone had left at my photography club. I had looked at this set of portraits on the photographers website early last year just before finishing TAOP in 2011. One of my 2010 Xmas presents was a copy of his book "Yangtse - The Long River" and I recorded my comments on the Yangtse photographs in my blog in January 2011.

I remember feeling puzzled by the style of his portraits. In my mind I was comparing these to the Annie Leibovitz portraits of US politicians that I had seen in the 2009 retrospective of her work "A Photographers Life 1990 - 2005" at the National Portait Gallery, London. Nadav Kander's portraits appeared to resemble snapshots, lacking the natural-looking light and stylish postures of Leibovitz portraits.

The article was interesting as Kander explained his intentions for this sequence of portraits that was commissioned by the New York Times.

The interview with Journal editor David Bland was entitled "The Question Mark" and the title was explained in the opening paragraphs with Kander was talking about his style of photography:-

"What I look for in a portrait and what I look for in a landscape are the same. It is always slightly uncomfortable, with the question mark rather than the exclamation mark. I love Bill Brandt's work: it's a similar effect. There's a disquiet there, and a questioning."

He also commented that "My work has very little to do with the decisive moment. It doesn't really come into my way of thinking. I don't need to see the moment. I take it. I'm not a documentarian, I am not a hunter."

His precise meaning here is unclear. What I take from his comments are

• Not all photography involves finding a decisive moment.
• I think his comment "I am not a hunter" refers to an analogy that photographers can be categorized as "hunters" or "fishermen". Hunter photographers use movement and speedy reactions to capture the elusive "prey" . For fishermen photographers, on the other hand, it is patience and guile that gets them the shot.

I have summarized some of the interesting points he made regarding his intentions for this commission:-

• They were intended to be viewed as a set, not as individual portraits. Indeed the New York Times devoted an entire issue to these portraits of the Obama Administration.
• He wanted the portraits to still be interesting in 20 years time. So that the portraits would not become too dated, he wanted the simplest possible format.
• He wanted to produce "accurate" portraits. His idea was to mimic a "photocopy" using a totally plain background and no context of the location i.e. no desk, room etc.
• He wanted the subjects to participate in the portrait making process. They could bring along something that belonged to them. He asked them to stand in a precise position and then he watched them to see how they would "handle their surroundings". If they got stuck, he suggested they remove their jacket or put their hands in their pockets.

His aim was to produce a set of similar subjects against an absolutely plain background. This has the effect that small details become important e.g. a particular hand posture. Such details would not be noticed in a portrait of someone seated at a desk or in a room. He acknowledges that this idea follows the thinking of Bernd and Hilla Becher in their series of photographs of water towers, blast furnaces etc.

The "oddity" with this sequence is that he added the shadows behind the figures at the printing stage. As a result, the subjects look as if they are standing immediately in front of a backdrop. In fact, the subjects were standing a long way away from the backdrop. He decided to add the shadow "to make things more interesting, more thought provoking: something odd that strikes you as not quite right". I am not sure that this subtlety would be detectible by the audience to produce the discordant note that he intends. As a student of photography, I will sometimes study the shadows in photographs to try and work out the direction and nature of the light source. These particular shadows, however, did not strike me as unnatural, even though I now know that they were artificially added.

Conclusions

Nadav Kander explains in the interview how he became a professional photographer. I was interested that his early career was based on commercial advertising work e.g. Benson and Hedges was one of his clients. My impression of this type of photography is that it involves close attention to detail, requiring total control over camera, lighting, setting etc. to achieve as near perfection technically and aesthetically as possible. This may account for the style of photography that he explains at the beginning of the article. With this commercial background, he is unlikely to become a street photographer in the style of Cartier Bresson or Doisneau.

Adding artificial shadows etc is probably fairly common practice in the field of commercial advertising.

His explanation of his intention in these photographs was fascinating and the I viewed the New York Times web page displaying the set of photographs with renewed interest and respect.