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The big picture: Nadav Kander’s diminutive Batman

The photographer Nadav Kander has sometimes seemed capable of almost anything. His cover portraits of powerful men – Barack Obama and Donald Trump among them – have become memorable, troubling, newsworthy images. His reportage photography, notably a series of journeys along the Yangtze in which he captured a vision of China’s often haunting incongruities, won him international prizes. An ongoing series of nudes, painted white, or shot in uncompromising closeup, have been widely acclaimed as redefining a tired genre. But this picture, of his son, Oren, dressed as Batman, is something of a surprising one-off in his work.

Kander, who grew up in Israel and South Africa, and who has long been based in London, includes it in a new book of his portraits called The Meeting. In his introduction to the book, Kander, 58, says that his ambition is always to “make a portrait that stirs a viewer [to] complete what I call ‘the triangle’ by bringing their own story or state of mind to the picture”. Many of the portraits in the book, bodies emerging out of blackness, famous faces juxtaposed with unknown subjects in rural South Africa, make just this kind of earnest demand. But what to make of Oren, standing on the ornamental wall of the caravan park?

You could make a case that the picture is part of Kander’s ongoing interrogation of masculinity and vulnerability. You could look at the year of the photograph, 2000, and note that the image makes the pointed suggestion that the new millennium required a new generation of superheroes. You could begin to analyse the perfect banalities of the staging. Better maybe just to smile at the diminutive Caped Crusader, posing shyly in the thin holiday sunshine, an image clearly as irresistible to Kander as any parent.

The Meeting is out now (Steidl, £80). An exhibition of portraits by Nadav Kander is at Flowers Gallery, London W1, until 2 February 2020