Larry Towell: The World From My Front Porch at Eastman House Feb. 16 through June 15

Magnum photographer focuses on his home in Canada as well as the issue of 'landlessness' — Mennonites and Palestinians plus El Salvador, Mexico, New Orleans

ROCHESTER, N.Y. — George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film presents Larry Towell: The World From My Front Porch, the Magnum photographer's largest U.S. exhibition to date. This multi-media retrospective focuses on the impact of social unrest on cultural identity as seen through Towell's lens, as he traveled from Canada to the Middle East, Central America, and the United States. The exhibition of more than 120 black-and-white images is on view Feb. 16 through June 15, 2008. The photographs will be accompanied by related artifacts — Mennonite clothing, shell casings from war zones, martyr posters, a water-soaked photo album from a Katrina survivor — as well as Towells' essays, musical recordings, and video presentations, some as 25-foot projections.

The World From My Front Porch will include photographs from Towell's 30 year-portfolio of activity and involvement in contemporary international issues of land use and control. Included are images of Mennonite migrant workers of Mexico, the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, civil war in El Salvador, victims of Hurricane Katrina, and other areas in social crisis where Towell has witnessed the "landless poor." The exhibition also will feature images from a rare personal reportage of his own family and land in rural Ontario, Canada.

His business card reads "Larry Towell, Human Being." Experience as a poet and a folk musician has done much to shape his personal style. Towell grew up in a large family in rural Ontario, Canada. As a visual arts student at Toronto's York University, he was given a camera and black-and-white film. The photographs he has captured over the last three decades, from an intimate perspective, are from a journey to a variety of destinations, such as Nicaragua, Guatemala, Alaska, El Salvador, Palestine, and Mexico.

The journey has led to his current body of work, The World From My Front Porch, in which he explores his own world and has documents what he calls "a crisis of landlessness... a phenomenon caused by the agro-export economy, globalization, free trade, and national building without respect for indigenous populations."

"Today, one human being in six lives in a 'squatter city' as farmers throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America migrate from the plots of land they farmed for generations and on which they can no longer subsist, to live in urban slums," Towell said. "A growing number, 35 million persons, also live in exile, cut off from their rural origins, often due to conflict over land."

"Although I travel extensively, it is usually with a sense of exile. From Hanoi to Managua, from San Salvador to East Jerusalem and the Occupied Territories, the longing for home persists. Although a journalist must work in the arena of international events, when I am not traveling, I turn the camera inward."

Towell's photographs and essays have been published extensively, in publications such as LIFE, GEO, Stern, Elle, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and The New York Times. A montage of these clippings will be displayed as part of the exhibition. He is the author of 10 books chronicling his travels. A new book, titled The World from My Front Porch, will be published in conjunction with the exhibition and will make its debut during his Eastman House lecture in April.

Support for Larry Towell: The World from My Front Porch is provided by Bogen Imaging, Inc., Bulrush Foundation, The Maxion Family Charitable Trust, and Time Warner Cable. A portion of this exhibition has been printed with a generous donation from HP on the Z3100 printer. The exhibition is part of an exhibition series this winter and spring at Eastman House titled Loss/Hope.

About Larry Towell
A stint of volunteer work in Calcutta in 1976 provoked Towell to photograph and write. Back in Canada, he taught folk music to support himself and his family. In 1984 he became a freelance photographer and writer focusing on the dispossessed, exile, and peasant rebellion. He completed projects on the Nicaraguan Contra war, on the relatives of the disappeared in Guatemala, and on American Vietnam War veterans who had returned to Vietnam to rebuild the country.

His first published magazine essay, "Paradise Lost," exposed the ecological consequences of the catastrophic Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska's Prince William Sound. He became a Magnum nominee in 1988, and a full member in 1993.

Towell completed in 1996 a project based on 10 years of reportage in El Salvador, and followed the next year with a major book on the Palestinians. His fascination with landlessness also led him to the Mennonite migrant workers of Mexico, an 11-year project completed in 2000. In 2005, he finished a second highly acclaimed book on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in 2005.

Towell's awards include the inaugural Henri Cartier-Bresson prize, World Press Photo Award, the Hasselblad Foundation Award, the Eugene Smith Award, several "Picture of the Year" awards, and the Roloph Beny, Ernst Haas, and Oskar Barnack awards. Towell resides in rural Ontario with his wife and children, where he sharecrops a 75-acre farm.

"An anthropologist never collects Persian carpets or jade heads with beady eyes. He goes straight to the garbage piles of past cultures because that which is thrown away, tells him everything. I'm a rag picker myself, a collector of useless debris, things left behind, children's art, and junk. It all started for me as a boy along the goldenrod paths and cow pastures that led to the river and into the hardwood forests where I began to listen to nature and collect insects, flowers, and animal bones. It led me to the abandoned farmhouses and barns of southwestern Ontario where I discovered the unofficial museums and the meaning of personal photography. That led me to the war-ravaged landscape and burned-out villages in Central America and from there to the refugee camps of Palestine. It made me look at my own land differently."

Larry Towell at Eastman House
An "unorthodox" visit from Larry Towell, who will discuss his work through photographs, spoken wordd, and musical accompaniment at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 27, in the Dryden Theatre. Towell will be accompanied by harmonica virtuoso Mike Stevens. Included with museum admission. At this event, Towell will launch his book The World from My Front Porch and conduct a booksigning, in conjunction with his retrospective exhibition on view at Eastman House (The World from My Front Porch by Larry Towell, published by Chris Boot, $75).

Loss/Hope Series
In a series of exhibitions opening throughout winter and spring 2008, George Eastman House focuses on the photograph's unique ability to take its viewers to parts of the world they might not otherwise know. From the slums of 19th-century London, to the Depression dust bowl, to the variety of contemporary lives in black America and the Middle East, the series Loss/Hope informs us and asks for our engagement by considering the notion of loss, both personally and as a result of industrialization and poverty. The Loss/Hope series is sponsored by Nixon Peabody LLP.

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