The Shadow And The Dance: An interview with Nadav Kander

When I turn up at his north London studio, Nadav Kander is on the phone. He is explaining, patiently but persuasively, why his pictures shouldn’t be exhibited behind Perspex and although I can’t hear the person on the other end of the call, when he hangs up I sense he’s got his way. A dog trots amiably around us and Nadav is polite and personable as we sit down to talk about his stellar career, which has seen him photograph the likes of David Beckham, Tinie Tempah, Henry Kissinger, Nick Cave, Missy Elliott, Michael Caine, Tony Blair, Ricky Gervais and Barack Obama. Even across such a broad range of subjects, the style of Nadav’s portraiture is consistent – there tends to be an unsettling, brooding quality to his pictures, if not dark then certainly intense. “I think there’s probably more truth about myself in my portraits than there is about the person,” he says. “When you are presented with a person you talk to them and react to their body language and those are the things that inform you as to the darkness, the lightness, the direction and all the tools you have to photograph them. That’s often very correct for the person and it’s often quite correct for you and it’s that triangle I find very interesting. “The triangle being myself and the sitter and the viewer and the viewer is equally important because I’ve managed to cause them an emotion by the way that I have my sitter positioned or the way they’re looking. How much of that is me and how much of that is the sitter? Who knows, but that’s the beautiful kind of dance.” Beautiful yes, but his own influences are tinged with something more complex. He’s drawn to the work of Francis Bacon because it’s “challenging” and “troubled.” “I like to immerse myself in that kind of scenario. I don’t really want to go to Disneyland…well I do. It’s probably the same. That’s a bad example. But I don’t photograph on a beach where everyone is at ease.” In fact he thinks putting subjects at ease is overrated. “Some people come in and they love the process but others are so cautious and stiff because they are fearful of something. I don’t want to change that if that’s who they are.” The clue to the genesis of Nadav’s artistic approach might be found in his biography. His parents met in Israel, his father having fled Nazi Germany, but they moved to South Africa when he was very small – in fact the plane journey there is his first memory. But his family arrived in a country riven by racial and social tensions. “I don’t think I was a particulalrly happy chap there. I think it was a very aggressive society. I remember often feeling unsafe, feeling I’d get beaten up, fights would break out. I liked to hang out with the toughest guys who were quite a lot older. I think being interested in peripheries, in edges comes out in my work because I don’t feel mainstream. “It’s probably all tied in together. I didn’t fit that well there because I wasn’t a big macho dude. I tried to act it, I had a big motorbike (a Triumph 650) when I was 15 so it’s a real mish-mash and it’s all a bit confusing to me. But I do think when you make art if you are authentic to yourself and strong enough, you turn yourself inside out. “That’s the kind of work that I like; work that really shows a person’s atmosphere, how comfortable they are with their surroundings, with their lot. That’s what I think good art is made of.” Apart from motorbikes, the other passion he discovered in South Africa was taking pictures, and it was pursuing this creative path that would bring him to England aged 21. He went to the Photographers Gallery every day but his shyness made it difficult to make the necessary professional connections. By the time he landed his first job as a photographer’s assistant, he had already booked his ticket back to South Africa. Several decades later he identifies himself as a Londoner but admits: “I think I am more patriotic to Britain than Britain would be to me.” Interestingly what first drew Nadav to photography was a technical rather than creative impulse. “I really do love beautifully-made mechanical things. I used to take watches apart when I was eight or nine and could never put them together again. My grandfather had an old movie camera and I just loved how it worked; there was no TV in South Africa at that time, and when I was bored I would go into his cupboard to play with this camera, to wind it up and reel it off. He also had a stills camera and just the way it would turn with each click – it was lovely to me. “That’s why I bought a camera. I wanted to move forward with this instrument but it almost came from the mechanical side rather than wanting to take pictures. The first pictures I ever took – and I have them upstairs – I found a dead fly and put it on a newspaper and photographed it so close that the fly is most of the frame with just some out-of-focus newsprint. When you think how revealing and naked that is, in a way it doesn’t feel that different from what I am still doing.” Rebe