Larry Towell: Selections from the AGW Collection

“If there’s one theme that connects all my work, I think it’s that of land-lessness; how land makes people into who they are and what happens to them when they lose it and thus lose their identities.” – Larry Towell

While images of war, violence, misery and loss flood our televisions and computer screens, Larry Towell’s black-and-white photographs of everyday people caught in extraordinary circumstances invite viewers to pause and look deeply. The photographs in this exhibition span three decades and move from Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador to Palestine. What ties these images together are his subjects – survivors of the traumas of their disappeared children and family members – as they carry on with their daily lives. His contemplative images convey the resilience of humanity and the brutality of human folly.

Larry Towell is the first Canadian photographer to be associated with Magnum, the prestigious agency founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa in 1947. After completing a visual arts degree at York University in Toronto in 1976, Towell volunteered in Calcutta where he began his photography. In 1984, he became a freelance photographer and writer, and has received considerable recognition, including the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award, World Press Photo of the Year, the Hasselblad Award, Alfred Eisenstadt Award, Oskar Barnack Award, and the first Roloff Beny Book Award for his 1997 monograph El Salvador.