Stephen Bulger Gallery
Art Toronto 2015

Larry Towell is a photojournalist with Magnum Photos who has devoted much of the last 30 years depicting the day to day life of people living within conflict situations around the world. Based out of a 75 acre farm in Southwestern Ontario, Towell interspersed his work away from home with a series about family life over the course of several decades.

Our special presentation for Art Toronto will highlight his photographs of children and incorporate photographs made within 500 yards of his front porch with images hailing from such places as Afghanistan, El Salvador, Guatemala, the Gaza Strip, and Mexico.

In 1976, after completing a Visual Arts degree at York University in Toronto, Towell volunteered in Calcutta where he began photographing and writing. In 1984, he became a freelance photographer and writer. He completed projects on the Nicaraguan Contra war, the relatives of the disappeared in Guatemala, and the American Vietnam War veterans who had returned to Vietnam to rebuild the country.

In 1996, Towell completed a project based on ten years of reportage in El Salvador, followed by two major books on the Palestinians. His fascination with landlessness also led him to the Mennonite migrant workers of Mexico, an eleven-year project completed in 2000. Larry Towell has won many international photo awards, including the Henri Cartier-Bresson Award (first recipient), the World Press Photo of the Year, the Hasselblad Award, the Alfred Eisenstadt Award, the Oskar Barnack Award, and the first Roloff Beny Book award for his 1997 monograph titled El Salvador. He is also a gifted writer and musician, author of three CDs, and director of the award winning short film Indecisive Moments (2008).