Nadav Kander Unnamed II, Zambia, '99, 2025

A part of my practice is to photograph close in portraits of human beings. I've been doing so for three decades. The communication between myself and the sitter is mostly non-verbal as I look deeply at them. I watch their eye movement, their mouth, the gestures they make and their hands. Something is conjured in these periods and photographs are made.  

Alongside this, these photographs of hands, centre frame, alone, and with a detached formality, hold a very special place for me in the work I have made. The hands and their gestures divulge so much, often in contrast to the face or the spoken word. Perhaps the most compelling portrait of a person is not their face at all, but their hands. 

Nadav Kander (b. 1961) is a London-based photographer, artist and director renowned for his portraiture and large-format landscape photographs. In 2024 a major survey exhibition Nadav Kander: The Edge of Things was staged at Grand Établissement Thermal, Vichy, supported with text by writer and curator David Campany.