YANGTZE, THE LONG RIVER (China, 2010)

Although made very recently, Nadav Kander’s photographs of life along the Yangtze river in China could never be repeated – so rapid is the change to which China is subject. Kander sees the Yangtze – the 6500 kilometre long river that is the lifeblood for three-hundred million Chinese citizens – as a metaphor for that change. He travelled along the river and recorded an industrialising landscape in which people appear insignificant and interchangeable. Kander strove for an intuitive approach, but could not escape politically charged, documentary photography. Millions of farmers and residents of villages and small cities have had to make way for progress. Kander shows a nation that is wip-ing out its past at an amazing and unnatural pace in an attempt to catapult itself into being the world’s dominant economic power.