During the cold war, Kurchatov and Priozersk on the borderlands between Russia and Kazakhstan were secret cities, closed off to foreigners and not identified on official maps. These were the sites where, for four decades, Russian scientists created prototype atomic bombs and developed an advanced missile shield in a frantic effort to catch up with the US military’s deadly adventure.  In 1941 the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb near Kurchatov, unbeknown to the local population, who were monitored as the effects of radiation sickness spread for miles around, affecting the land, the crops and the animals that grazed the foothills of the steppes. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, the test sites now lie in ruins, having been dismantled by the Russian military with help from American experts. As shown in Nadav Kander’s new series, Dust, they possess a strange, sometimes eerie beauty that he captures in his signature style: large-format landscapes full of stillness and light that continue his visual exploration of what he calls “the aesthetics of destruction”.  Kander’s most celebrated series, Yangtze: the Long River, which won the Prix Pictet prize in 2009, was the result of a 4,000-mile photographic odyssey from Shanghai to Qinghai province in the rural west of China. The power of the images was suggestive, almost subliminal insofar as you sensed that something tumultuous – China’s sudden urge towards modernity at whatever human cost – simmered beneath the formal calmness of the images of abandoned towns, submerged villages and vast new flyovers.  Kander thinks big. The size of his prints reflects his ambition as well as his acute understanding of scale and architectural eye for composition. In their beauty, though, they also accentuate the paradoxical nature of his approach: the rendering of the desolate sublime. In his catalogue essay, the novelist Will Self writes: “These images do not make beautiful what is not, they ask of us that we repurpose ourselves to accept a new order of both the beautiful and the real.” I am not entirely convinced by that claim. Digitally printed to a degree of verisimilitude that the darkroom could never produce, Kander’s images possess a hyper-real aspect that to me makes them seem oddly unreal.  His works also possess a painterly quality, not just in their perfect composition but in the use of soft light and muted colour tones to bathe earth, trees and crumbling concrete in a warm glow. As with the similarly epic work of Edward Burtynsky, there is the lingering sense that something human has been lost in all the digitised grandeur, in this utterly faithful reproduction of the natural and the man-made. It was almost a relief to glimpse a discarded polythene bag in one photograph, a residue of ordinary – rather than epic and historical – human behaviour.  In another image, a figure stands beneath a building, staring up at a high wall that looks like it may topple at any minute. This turns out to be Kander himself, the artist dwarfed by his subject and, in a rare moment of referential humour, looking as vulnerable as Buster Keaton in that famous scene where a house collapses around him.  There is, of course, much to admire here formally and aesthetically. At heart, Kander is a craftsman: he still mostly shoots on film and is a master of composition, colour and atmosphere. His images evince a palpable sense of stillness and silence – though look closely and you will see the blur of the wind on grass and shrub. As the exhibition title suggests, the series deals with the fallout, physical and psychological, real and metaphorical, of the recent geopolitical past. One of the predominant colours is rust brown – as if the earth has somehow seeped upwards and outwards into grass, tree and rock. In one compelling image – the first one you see as you enter the newly redesigned Flowers East gallery – a city appears shadow-like in the far distance beneath a grey sky, an empty snow-covered field in the foreground giving way to a makeshift graveyard where rickety wooden crosses stand humbly against the elements. For all its epic scale, it is an affecting image of the kind of quiet human dignity that survives in even the most extreme circumstances.  In another arresting image, a statue of a young woman gazes from atop a rust-brown rock across a vast sea, a relic of another time, when all this secrecy and disregard for human life went hand-in-hand with Soviet military might. With one leg and her arms now missing, she looks like something created by Marc Quinn and, in her imperfect way, stands as a symbol of the damaged land around here as well as the damaged political thinking that sacrificed its own citizens in its frenzy to create the ultimate weapon of mass destruction.  These sublimely beautiful ruins are haunted and haunting, derelict monuments to a long winter of mutual enmity between Russia and the west that, of late, no longer seems so distant or, indeed, unreal. Nadav Kander: Dust is at the Flowers Gallery, London until until 11 October
The desolate is rendered sublime in these epic images of a land laid waste by Soviet nuclear ambitions, says Sean O’Hagan