Eye of the Storm

Although Towell has photographed some of the world’s most violent hotspots, he is by no means a war photographer. “The whole adrenalin world of war photography is white, Western, bourgeois,” he says. “The photographs of the violence are shallow. I’ve been photographing El Salvador for ten years. The newsy photographs are gone, but if you go into things deep, that work will stay.”

Towell’s approach to the Israeli-occupied territories and Israel’s most recent incursion into Lebanon has been, as he puts it, to “go narrow and deep.” In Sunlight on Street, Gaza, 1993, feet scoot away from a perfect triangle of sunlight on dark, oily pavement that looks spattered with blood. In a series of pictures shot during the second intifada, young men wield slingshots fashioned from found materials. And in the heartbreaking Boy in Destroyed House, Perimeter of Refugee Camp and Gush Katif Jewish Settlement, Khan Yunis Refugee Camp, Gaza Strip, 2003, a teenager smokes quietly in a house whose roof and walls have been ripped off, the neighbourhood beyond reduced to rubble.

In what may be one of the most powerful and emblematic images of New York from September 11, 2001, Towell photographed a man in a business suit standing in dust and debris, reading a scrap of paper that had fluttered down when the twin towers collapsed. “After some experience in conflict, I realized that violence is easy to photograph because it is already emotional and dramatic,” Towell writes. “Intimacy, the antithesis of violence — though often set against a background of violence and suffering — is actually more difficult to photograph than war, because hope is invisible.” A boy smoking and thinking in a ruined house, a man absorbed in a piece of paper that survived the slaughter of nearly 3,000 people — these are private, intimate moments surrounded by destruction, revealing glimmers of hope because they are testaments to people who survived.

Towell’s interest in “landscapes of destruction” began when he started shooting with a panoramic camera. But here, as elsewhere, his focus is on the human dimension. In these pictures, he explains, “rather than taking the traditional approach of looking at landscape through human beings, I look at human beings in the landscape. I use the panoramic in the same way I would use a 35mm, but with the panoramic the landscape is naturally brought up.”

Perhaps the most striking of Towell’s landscapes of destruction were taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In one of the series, Waveland, Mississippi, September 5, 2005, a Catholic church is razed to its foundation, a sculpture of the Virgin Mary in the foreground, the glistening sea behind. Another is of a house that has been literally ripped open, its contents — mattresses, furniture, clothes, everything — strewn about, again with the serene sea in the background. Neither of these images has any people in it, but in a way human beings are a spectral presence. These are, after all, places where people worshipped and lived, places where their private and spiritual lives were sustained, exposed now in all their vulnerability to the forces of nature. Human beings in the landscape.

To get a tour of Larry Towell’s house is also to get a tour of its history, and of Towell’s history and sensibility. Vintage family photographs. Children’s drawings. Books. Endless guitars, including one that looks like it was made from an old oil can. Cameras. Knick-knacks. The leftover lumber from the beautiful, rough-hewn wooden floors in the extension he built to the original farmhouse was found discarded in a nearby forest. Some of the windows, which offer a view of the long fields he sharecrops out behind the house, were salvaged from ruined farmhouses back when he thought he might want to build a house of his own. “I’ve always been a junk collector,” he says. “As a kid, I collected feathers and bones in the woods; now at a clash site I bring all of this stuff back.”

In addition to reproductions of his photographs, The World from My Front Porch contains a generous sampling of Towell’s collecting habits: arrowheads, old family photographs, drawings and a rusty surveyor’s chain from Samuel Smith (the nineteenth-century surveyor whose house and land Towell now owns), slingshots made by Palestinian kids, bullet casings and missile shards, crude paintings made at his behest by political prisoners in El Salvador. Towell seems especially fond of the children’s drawings he recently brought back from South Africa. “It’s a habit I started in art school,” he tells me, “appreciating the beauty of simple things — things that aren’t in the art world but are art in the real sense of the word.” And that is perhaps the underlying point: Towell’s commitment to the redemptive power of beauty, the sense of hope that beauty inspires, is always rooted in the concrete reality of human life. Whereas digital images are for Towell ephemeral, photographs are unique things with histories, like bones and feathers.

If Larry Towell’s house has the idiosyncratic, homey clutter of the obsessive junk collector, his basement darkroom is all business. In the front room is a table covered with proof prints for his contribution to the Magnum aids project, for which he is on a tight deadline. On the wall is an archive of past and current projects. Then there is the long stainless steel sink, and a separate room for an enlarger on tracks projecting onto an old blackboard, which enables him to create oversized prints. He points out that he bought it cheap, because traditional photography is out of fashion.

“In photography, there are no words, only symmetry and emotion,” Towell writes. “There is a meditation to the still image however, that comes from stopping to look at the geometry of the world with all of our senses in order to capture a bit of it and confine it to one small space in recognition of a personal point of view. Photography casts aside the clutter, the commotion, and the noise of the world, in order to keep its form, shape and substance true to itself and in one complete thought.” He may be a purist who respects the hard discipline of art, developing and printing his black and white photographs in the basement of his house, but he’s by no means reductive. That’s why he brings home debris from the places he photographs. That’s why he records sounds from those places, and makes video sketches of them, such as Indecisive Moments, a video diary he made in the occupied territories.

Towell’s world is big and various, and not all of it is amenable to still photography. “When I feel like I’ve exhausted the material in a place, or there just aren’t any pictures,” he says, “that’s when I turn to video and sound.” But in the end what endures is that investment of time and love, the narrow and the deep, the poetry of simple things and ordinary life: his daughter wading into the Sydenham River with her two-year-old brother in her arms, the water rippling with light; five Mennonite women in identical dresses and broad-brimmed hats in Durango, Mexico, running through a wild, dusty gust of wind. “Your pictures are who you are,” Towell says. “The worst danger is losing your identity.