PROMISED LANDS

Larry Towell's stirring images of wartime and home life star in a new exhibit

- Jadine Ngan

THE SYDENHAM RIVER begins at the edge of Ontario, closer to Detroit than Toronto, and runs through a smattering of small towns along the border. It's a place of freshwater mussels and sprawling farmland. It's also where Larry Towell has spent his entire life. He grew up along the river in rural Lambton County and, in 1975, he salvaged lumber from a bulldozed barn and built a raft. He perched a shed on top and floated down the waters. He wrote songs; he lived off catfish. After graduating from York University's visual arts program, he spent two solitary years on the raft. "Being rooted in your own life gives you a position to look outward," he says. Look outward he did: Towell spent the next 40 years capturing images at home and abroad, more than a hundred of which will be on view in Boundaries, a retrospective running until March 14, 2026, at the Judith and Norman Alix Art Gallery in Sarnia, Ontario.

Towell first travelled to Central America in the early 1980s to document the civil wars tearing through the region. In Nicaragua, American-backed Contras burned farming cooperatives, mined the ports and carried out ambushes and kidnappings. He arrived in the country with nothing but a knapsack, a camera and a tape recorder and asked locals for a lift to the conflict zones. That was how he worked in the early days: no assignment, no fixer, no press card. Just him, hitchhiking his way through.