Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Sarah Bassnett, Professor of Art History, Western University
In 1984, the now-acclaimed Canadian photojournalist Larry Towell was an aspiring writer who turned to photography during a human rights fact-finding mission to Central America.
At the time, the Ronald Reagan administration in the United States was justifying its support for military dictatorships in El Salvador, Nicaragua and Guatemala as anti-communist containment.
Mainstream news coverage of the conflicts in these countries was sporadic and often superficial. This made it difficult for North Americans to understand the scope of American involvement in the region and obscured the extent of human rights violations.
“I was struggling with language,” Towell told The Tyee about this time in this life.
“When I went to Central America I realized there was a horrible war going on and a media disinformation campaign going on and I wanted to be a part of the process of presenting some language that demonstrated that a lot of what we were hearing were lies.”
Photographs by Towell, as well as photos by others, were important in raising awareness of the brutal impact of U.S. military and intelligence operations in Latin America.
Towell’s photograph of a daughter comforting her grieving mother at the grave of her son conveys in one powerful image a family’s anguish and the emotional toll of the civil conflict.
Magnum Photo agency member
Towell began working as a freelance photojournalist in 1984, and in 1988 he became the first Canadian member of the famed Magnum Photo agency. Magnum Photos is an international co-operative of photographer-members founded in 1947 with the aim of giving photographers greater control over their work.
During his career, Towell has published 16 books, and his photo essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, LIFE, The Atlantic and The New Yorker. He has won numerous awards, including the Henri Cartier-Bresson award, the World Press photo of the year award in 1994, along with prestigious book prizes, the Roloff Beny and the Prix Nadar.
He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020 and his feature-length documentary film, The Man I Left Behind, was released in 2025.
Like many other Magnum photographers, Towell favours sustained investigative projects rooted in specific places and issues. Over decades of professional practice, he has worked in numerous conflict zones, including Afghanistan, Palestine, Guatemala and Ukraine.
But as curator Grant Arnold explained regarding an exhibition of Towell’s work in 1988, Towell does not go into these contexts as a detached observer. For Towell, photography is about connecting with people and communities.
As a researcher working on photography and its role in systems of power, I situate Towell’s work within the tradition of humanist photography.
This approach consistently foregrounds human resilience in the face of suffering and hardship. Seen from this humanist lens, Towell is interested in getting close to subjects to better understand and represent their experiences. His work humanizes complex social and political issues.
Exhibitions important for viewer engagement
Although magazines have played a central role in disseminating Towell’s photography, exhibitions and books are key formats that offer more sustained engagement. Exhibitions are, in many ways, an ideal form for in-depth investigative projects because their spatial dimension allows curators to work with elements, including layout, sequencing and framing. A series of photographs can be shown together to develop connections and tell a story.
Exhibitions enhance viewer engagement by promoting focused attention and by intensifying emotional responses through arrangement and scale. Towell’s work lends itself to exhibition because his projects are best understood within a series, where photographs relate to one another and to an overarching theme.
The exhibition Larry Towell: Boundaries curated by Sonya Blazek at the Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery in Sarnia, Ont., focuses on human relationships to the land.
Towell’s photographs show Indigenous people displaced from their land in El Salvador and Mennonites living off the land in Canada and Mexico. He portrays migrants fleeing poverty and violence in Haiti and Central America, sheltering in tents near the U.S.-Mexico border. He represents the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock in North Dakota, where members of the Sioux Nation asserted their sovereignty in defence of their land and water.
Within the exhibition, views encounter themes of displacement and landlessness through the material qualities and arrangement of the photographs, which invite a physical, embodied mode of looking.
As visitors wander through the gallery, they hear music by Towell, who is a gifted musician with five original albums.
Magnum photography exhibitions
Exhibitions have been an important format, not only for Towell, but also for other Magnum photographers. Magnum was at the forefront of establishing photography exhibitions as an alternative to publishing images in illustrated magazines.
The agency’s first group exhibition in 1955, called Face of Time, was a post-Second World War investigation of the human condition featuring the work of eight of the agency’s early members. After its initial run, the exhibition material was lost, but it has since been rediscovered and restored.
That original exhibition, which has been re-staged by curator Gaëlle Morel at The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University, shows how Magnum created new audiences for photography by disseminating stories about world events beyond the pages of news magazines. As a Magnum photographer, Towell’s exhibitions today are a legacy of this history.
‘Slow journalism’
Towell has described his projects as slow journalism because he spends years and sometimes even a decade on a project. He has said: “The longer you spend, the deeper you go.”
Weeks or months in the field are followed by an extended editing process to create a coherent narrative out of each investigation. Towell’s work is based on the idea of bearing witness and documenting history, and exhibitions of his work invite viewers to experience the world beyond their everyday lives.
Larry Towell: Boundaries is on view at the Judith & Norman Alix Art Gallery in Sarnia, Ont. until March 21, 2026.
Magnum’s First is on view at The Image Centre in Toronto until April 4, 2026.
Sarah Bassnett receives funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
– ref. Larry Towell exhibition: Experiencing the world beyond everyday life through photography – https://theconversation.com/larry-towell-exhibition-experiencing-the-world-beyond-everyday-life-through-photography-277690
