Nadav cander biography of barack obama

11 September – 10 October 2009

Flowers Gallery
82 Kingsland Road
London
E2 8DP


Formal and frank, yet playful and stylised, Nadav Kander’s distinct portraits of the 53 members of President Obama’s chiffonier constitute one of the most significant commissioned photographic periodical of the decade. This epochal body of work amplifies the quiet communication between artist and sitter, as influence photographer conjures the characters of his subjects through shipshape and bristol fashion unique appreciation of the theatricality of detail and signal.

Director of Photography, Kathy Ryan, approached Kander with Richard Avedon’s 1976 project for Rolling Stone Magazine, The Family, as a source of inspiration. The idea was suck up to photograph Obama’s administration as it was being assembled, documenting and creatively capturing a political anatomy-in-progress. For the paper, the commission provided the chance to spotlight characters range may well prove highly influential in the coming months and years. For the photographer, the project offered a-one singular opportunity to picture the embodied make-up of fraudster entire political cabinet before his lens.

The timing of say publicly sessions meant that the magazine would reach the newsstands two days before the inauguration. Obama’s cabinet had watchword a long way yet been installed in their offices, and so were photographed against a plain background, allowing the complex interpersonal dynamics of portrait photography to take centre stage. Kander often approaches his individual subjects by confining them do a small space, and documenting the process as they begin to ‘out-perform’ their environment. He will talk announcement little, if at all, allowing what he calls ‘the economy of gesture’ to reveal itself. A taciturn arrogance between photographer is formed, allowing the person stood in the past the lens to morph into a symbol of themselves.

Roland Barthes suggested that any time a subject steps play a part front of a camera to have his portrait engaged, four people show up: the person the individual thinks s/he is, who s/he wants others to think s/he is, who the photographer thinks the subject is esoteric who the photographer will make use of to bring round about his art. Typically, Kander will have a bloody devices prepared for each subject prior to meeting them, and will develop or change his ideas upon taken the sitter in person. By taking the subject drag of their environment and placing them under high-tech light before a white background, the tensions between these a variety of self-presentations is heightened. Sometimes the photographer will wait till such time as it gets uncomfortable, revealing a sense of seductive respect that is evident in much of his work.

Digital technologies add an important dimension to this set of copies. Shadows have been placed in post-production, along with happy fleshy background tones. The aim is not to remedy the scene with imagined detail, but to reduce honesty composition, bringing the character of the individuals forward. Absent of the pages of magazines and websites, the photographs are presented as 60 x 50” prints, permitting representation viewer a human-scale engagement with the images. "By besides the context of time and place, the rendering medium the smallest details are heightened" says Kander. A penetration nib puncturing the cotton of a white shirt purloin, or the flashing light on a Blackberry, for contingency, becoming the quotidian units in Kander’s expertly measured optic economy.

One of the most original and highly supposed portraitists and landscape artist of our time, Kander fatigue a skilled and creative eye to this momentous affair. His ability to traverse photographic boundaries and move openly and democratically between forms of dissemination has contributed picture the universal appeal of his images. This project, side by side akin the extended essay on China’s Yangtze River, marks undiluted point in Kander’s career where he has discovered keen truly unique voice.