By Dan White – Special to the Sydenham Current
I had planned to conclude my Wallaceburg Writers’ Series this week with a column about a local business where you can get your book published. However, another opportunity presented itself.
I first heard about Larry Towell from my good friend Mark Buchanan. Mark is a very talented photographer, at least by my humble standards. Every day, he invests time in walking with his wife, Roberta, a former SCITS and WDSS principal and a dear friend, and points his camera wherever she spots a bird. Mark and I were chatting about the arts, specifically the CK Arts and Culture Networks’ Heroes’ event in October of this year, which recognizes excellence in arts and culture by residents and former residents of CK. He insisted that I look up Larry Towell. I had never heard of Larry before, but I respect Mark’s opinion, so I did a Google search. Holy Moses, this man is gifted!
As luck would have it, I found Larry’s number and when I called, he was home on his 75-acre sharecrop farm near Bothwell, where he and his wife have lived and raised a family since 1988. He graciously agreed to spend some time chatting with me about his career. This self-proclaimed recluse lives a quiet life on his farm, in between traveling to locations mired in conflict.
There is a great deal of information about this world-class human on the internet, and I will just skim the surface here. If you want more information, go to https://momus.ca/land-and-landlessness-a-conversation-with-larry-towell/ – this interview by Giancarlo Roma is far better than anything I could create. I will focus on a few fun facts and local stories.
I have looked at a number of sites on the internet, and Larry is often referred to as a “celebrated Lambton County photographer”. However, our neighbor to the north is not where Larry was raised. Larry was born in Chatham and grew up just outside Wallaceburg in Becher, where his father had an auto body business that still remains in the family.
Larry attended WDSS, and a junior classmate from his drama class with Mr. Deary, another gifted artist, David Farquar, recently recalled Larry creating a stop motion video of a mousetrap chasing a mouse around a barn as a drama class project. David still recalls this with awe some five decades after the presentation. As I shared this story with Larry, a note of joy arose as he cheerfully recalled the project and mentioned that the video was his very first film. He noted that, “Mr. Deary was good in that way, he let us try anything.” Larry has a full-length feature film coming out based on his travels in the world, documenting mostly conflicts. The film is titled, “The Man I Left Behind”. The 70-year-old quipped that these two films may be his first and last ones, but hopefully, he has more to share in the coming years.
After Larry graduated from York University, where he studied visual arts and creative writing, he traveled to India, working at Mother Teresa’s Mission of Charity in Calcutta. It was here that the reality of poverty hit him, and the seeds for a lifelong quest to understand and educate others about the impact of land and landlessness began.
When Larry returned home from India, he built a homemade raft with a little shack in the middle of it and spent two years floating on the Sydenham and writing poetry. It was a time of reflection and introspection.
Larry is also an accomplished musician, with a triple vinyl album being released. All of his songs are about photography and places he has been. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss, “Oh, the places he has been.” Larry has photographed conflicts in Central America during several conflicts, Afghanistan, Palestine for 2 years, he developed a bond with Mennonites and documented their life both in Southern Ontario and Mexico. Coming out this fall is his most recent book, “The History War”, documenting struggles in Ukraine from 2014 to the Russian invasion in 2022. On 9-11, Larry happened to be in New York when he heard the Twin Towers had been attacked. He told me he didn’t even know where they were in relation to where he was staying; he just followed the smoke and started taking pictures. The police were moving people out of the area because it was a crime scene, so Larry hid until they passed and continued documenting the event.
I asked if he always had a love of photography, and he noted that he considered himself a writer and a visual artist first. Only when he felt that the people in front of him were more interesting than he was, did he move to photography.
Larry is a member of Magnum, an extremely exclusive club of the world’s most elite photographers. This group has a mere 43 members worldwide, and the process of becoming a member requires 3 stages of acceptance and a review of the applicant’s work at each of those stages, which takes a total of four or five years to complete. Each year, there are over 1,000 applicants to the society, and less than one member is accepted per year. No, that isn’t a typo, less than one out of 1,000. The standards are incredibly high for acceptance. Larry has been a member since 1993 and a board member for the past 15 years. He remains the only Canadian ever accepted into this group.
Larry has published 13 photo books, and his images have inspired the award-winning film by Sarah Polley, “Women Talking”. His list of awards and recognition is worth a gander on the internet. It is extensive. Once more, the most impressive fact about this incredibly talented artist is that Larry is humble. He shrugs off compliments and deflects credit. It was truly an honor to speak with him.
Watch for his book, album, and movie – all coming out soon.
