Nature and artifice

Abstract

This chapter discusses recent photographic work that illuminates one of the most ancient encounters between nature and artifice – that of river and city – an encounter which acquires renewed significance in our fraught late modernity. Through this discussion, the study aims to contribute to the argument about the relevance of photography as both an interpretative and poetic device for architecture and landscape. Nadav Kander’s photographic series Yangtze: The Long River (2006-08) is the specific focus here. Beyond its subject matter, Kander’s work interrogates the tension between natural and artificial, understood as ‘found’ and ‘constructed’, in the photographic process itself. Balancing between what is shown and what is withheld, what is given and what is remembered or imagined, between reality and construct, nature and artifice, the tensions at work in Kander’s photographs echo those of riverine conditions, and enrich our means of understanding the complexities of our late-modern world.

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