Beautys Nothing

Nadav Kander creates unfailingly beautiful photographs with the formal precision of a master photographer. But beauty is the beguiling lure for Kander's disconcerting explorations into representation through genre as diverse as portraiture, landscape, and still life. He employs the seductive charm of aestheticism to expose our inconsistent response to the female nude, to probe questions of morality and desire in a series on Cuban prostitutes, and to manifest the fragile imbalances of the American landscape with its endlessly repeating artifice at the edge of vast emptiness. The book is composed of chapters of images, interleaved with short stories, poems, and essays, each responding to a particular image or section. Each sequence elaborates a narrative, at times driven by the commissioned texts and often arising from the friction between two dissociated images. Nadav Kander was born in Israel in 1961 and was raised in South Africa. In 1982 he moved to London, where in 1986 he set up his first studio. Kander has received international critical acclaim for his photography and is one of the most sought-after photographers working today. In the preceding few years, Kander has shot for numerous magazines and commercial accounts, including Nova, Visionaire, Dazed & Confused, Raygun, Rolling Stone, Zoom, the London Sunday Times, Sports Illustrated, Graphis, and others. He has exhibited in museums and galleries such as the Saatchi Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Photographic Society, and the Tate Museum. This book, his first, is accompanied by an international touring exhibition.