On a March afternoon, threatening ice and snow, the landscape in Lambton has an austere, smouldering sensuality familiar to anyone who knows the photographs Towell has taken of his wife, Ann, and their four children. There are fields of tamped-down cornstalks and snow-streaked mud, breaks of trees barren and haunted, blurring up into a low grey sky, the brown river recently thawed. The farmhouses in this increasingly depopulated region tend to be plain, if not abandoned and dilapidated. But Towell’s home, set a kilometre or so off the main road on a bend in the river, has an elegant, funky aesthetic: tall, deep-blue trim crowned with cursive floral stylings, endless windows welcoming in floods of natural light from every direction, a water buffalo skull mounted above a neatly stacked pile of split logs.
When the fifty-four-year-old Towell answers the door, the wood-burning stove aglow behind him, he looks as though he could be one of the Mennonite farmers who live in the region. He wears a long silver beard, round tortoiseshell glasses, and suspenders stretched over a modest paunch, and projects a humble air of hospitality. One would hardly imagine that here, on a thirty-hectare farm in southwestern Ontario, lives a man who has been a member of the prestigious Magnum Photos agency; who currently has a new book, The World from My Front Porch, and a major career survey at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York; and who hardly a week ago returned from documenting the impact of cheap retroviral drugs on people living with aids in Cape Town’s impoverished shantytowns — work that will be exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, in June.
“They aren’t part of a larger project,” says Towell. “I just have cameras around the house, and when I see something I run out and shoot it.” But though these photographs form an extemporaneous family album of sorts, they are rigorous, emotionally complex, and thrumming with metaphors — about love, and intimacy, and family, and childhood, and innocence.
Towell’s work is above all about seeing: seeing what is there, seeing (or at least glimpsing) what it means to be a person. “We decline the artificiality of invention,” he writes in his introduction to The World from My Front Porch, “in exchange for the privilege of witness and the power of seeing.” And that is surely what the aesthetic of photography — and especially black and white photography, from Paul Strand and Walker Evans to Diane Arbus to the present, with its combination of precision and tactile sumptuousness and intimacy — is all about.
Unlike most contemporary photojournalists, who shoot with high-end digital cameras and print their work with ink and paper, Towell only uses traditional black and white film, whether he is in Gaza, Lebanon, or South Africa, or on his own back porch. “Black and white is still the poetic form of photography,” he says. “Digital is for the moment; black and white is an investment of time and love.” That Towell is concerned with the poetics of photography should come as no surprise. His meticulously realized compositions are saturated with the history of photography and the history of painting.
Towell studied visual art at York University in the early 1970s before moving on to poetry and music; he published several books of his poetry, and continues to record his idiosyncratic brand of folk music. But his impulse toward photography came from a different direction, one that is broadly moral and political. In the early 1980s, while he was living off the grid, teaching guitar, and tending his garden, he made his first trip to Central America. While travelling with a human rights group, he began taking photographs to illustrate the testimonies of the landless peasants in Nicaragua who rose up against the dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in the late 1970s. “I became a photographer because I wanted to see it,” he says, speaking of how photography drew him in. “And it gave me an excuse to go there.” Bearing witness, seeing: one of the defining features of photography is that it requires the photographer to be there, the light and dark of the actual refracting through a lens and onto film.
Towell’s work is astounding in its coherence. He treats people facing poverty, dispossession, and violent conflict in the same spirit as his own family. “I’m really interested in how people survive, how families survive,” he tells me over coffee at his rustic kitchen table. Mother with Daughter at Grave of Son Killed by Death Squads, 1991, part of an extended series on El Salvador, has a dramatic, classical feel, evocative of a Pietà, but it depicts a wrenchingly intimate moment: in a modest cemetery dotted with small white crosses, a bereft mother sinks into the arms of her daughter before the grave of her murdered son, with the beautiful, sunlit hills of El Salvador behind her. In Guerilla Recruit, 1991, a girl who looks no more than eighteen stands topless, washing her shining jet black hair. Were it not for the AK 47 beside her, it would be easy to imagine her bathing with Towell’s children in the river beside his house on a lazy summer afternoon.
In Jacob Bueckert and Daughter, Temporal Colony, Campeche, Mexico, 1996, part of a picture essay on struggling Mennonite communities in Mexico and South America, a lonely girl in a head scarf turns toward her father at the head of the table. The scene has the pristine quiet of a painting by Vermeer. In Ben Reddekop Wake, Durango Colony, Durango, Mexico, 1996, a body is laid out on a table surrounded by figures shrouded in black, the room behind ablaze with light. All illustrate how, in Towell’s words, photography “can take that which is ugly and make it beautiful, not by misrepresentation, but by stopping to look more deeply at the subject itself . . . The ordinary becomes distinct, the way poetry transforms words. This handling of the ordinary is the life of photography itself. In this ordinariness, photography lives and breathes.” Photography has the power of redemption.
Comments