Nadav Kander for The New York Times Paul Kagame
For this week’s profile of the president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, by Jeffrey Gettleman, we commissioned Nadav Kander to photograph Kagame in London. The picture above and the one below are two outtakes from that May session.
Nadav Kander for The New York Times
Kander has photographed many world leaders, including David Cameron and Barack Obama (along with members of his administration for a special issue of the magazine in 2009, “Obama’s People”). Last year, he photographed actors of the British stage for us; that work was included in The British Journal of Photography’s Cool & Noteworthy in 2012, and one of the images was selected as the cover of PDN’s Photo Annual 2013 (another won a World Press Photo prize).Kander always prepares the same way when he’s taking portraits. He studies his subjects in advance, considers their facial structure and how best to light them and tries out lighting setups before his subject enters the room. Then he lets go, and allows his interaction with his sitters to determine what happens in the pictures.
“When a person sits down or stands in front of me, and I look through a camera, there are things that come to me,” Kander says. “And I see how people react. I also think that our bodies have a memory in a way, and if I ask somebody just to bend forward slightly or look slightly down, I’m almost putting people into positions that they are familiar with. . . . It’s when they feel themselves that the pictures work.”
SOURCE: NEW YORK TIMES
