The wall of Palestine.

LARRY TOWELL: NO MAN'S LAND

STEPHEN BULGER GALLERY

TORONTO, ONTARIO

MAY 14-JUNE 25, 2005

HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON FOUNDATION

PARIS, FRANCE 

APRIL 15-AUGUST 4, 2005

NO MAN'S LAND

LONDON: CHRIS BOOT LTD. (English ed.)

PARIS: TEXTUEL (French ed.)

144 PP./$80.00 (hb)

On May 14, halfway into "CONTACT 2005," the 9th annual Toronto Photography Festival, the Stephen Bulger Gallery opened "No Man's Land," a show by Ontario resident and Magnum photographer Larry Towell. The show comprises 21 (20" X 24") prints, three panoramic images (26" X 61") and one (35.5" X 51") print. All are black and white photographs taken with a fast film and processed in a way that gives them a grainy, gritty appearance that seems appropriate to an exhibition that deals with the second Intifada in Palestine. The principal sponsor of the project and exhibition, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, is hosting a concurrent show in Paris. Towell had won the first Henri Cartier-Bresson Prize in 1993 for his project. A book of 130 reproductions, No Man's Land, has been published in both French and English editions. The photographer is the only Canadian member of Magnum. He lives on a farm in Bothwell, Ontario a few miles from Toronto. Through him the Stephen Bulger Gallery has developed a relationship with Magnum that has led it to represent the co-operative in Canada.

The Walls of No Man's Land: Palestine opened in Paris on April 15 whereas the exhibition at the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto was scheduled halfway into Contact, the photography festival held there every May since 1997. This year's chosen theme for the festival was "Questioning Truth in Photography." Stephen Bulger has been one of the active participants and organizers of this festival, insisting on promoting fine-art photography and giving Toronto a name on the international scene. The relevance of the show to the 2005 theme becomes all the more obvious when it is noted that 90% of the images were taken from the Palestinian side. They do not necessarily represent a Palestinian point of view though as Towell, like all Magnum members, seems to be amazingly in control of his distance with the events, even in situations when this may not have been obvious.

A main difference between the Toronto and Paris shows must be stated here. Although this may look purely aesthetic, and could be dismissed as such by some, the choices made for the two shows could have other ramifications, or at least raise a few more questions. As mentioned above, the Stephen Bulger Gallery displayed huge prints, enlargements of 35mm black and white high speed negatives that look as if the printers exceeded the physical capacities of the film to render tone (a large palette of gray tones) and details. As a result the appearance of the photographs displayed is very graphic, textured (obvious coarse grain) and of a contrast above average. As such, the images may acquire the impact of posters, a degree of "social realism," where the gritty aspect of the image reflects the violence and tension of the depicted situations. They also lose a certain photographic, "fine print," quality.

At the Cartier-Bresson Foundation, which displayed twice as many photographs as the Stephen Bulger Gallery, this on two floors, the regular 35mm photographs were about 16" X 24" in size, and the panoramic ones about 16" X 45." The chosen ratio of enlargement, at the limit of a correct/traditional "photographic" rendition of details and mid-tones, resulted in images that kept the appearance of excellent black and white prints with tones that rendered the three-dimensionality of the photographed spaces. In no way did the visual pleasure derived from the excellent craft of the printers (three total, one at the Magnum lab in New York, the two others in Canada) distract from the content of the images. In fact it can be added that the aesthetic qualities of a print may often convince the beholder to spend more time in front of it and to remember it.

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Towell's photographic project "The Walls of No Man's Land: Palestine" (which won the first new biannual Henri Cartier-Bresson Award in 2003, offering its laureate a [euro]30,000 prize) began over 12 years ago after the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords between Israel and the Palestinian state. The prize helped Towell finance an extension of his previous work on Palestine. The photographer visited the occupied territories several times, recording the daily violence of life in the region in a direct (kids using slings against armed soldiers and tanks, masked men holding automatic weapons or making Molotov cocktails) and slanted way (a Palestinian mother carrying her baby away from an Israeli tank, the Wall separating Israel from the Occupied Territories, the burials of civilian victims). It was not Towell's first experience with a war/insurrection zone as, at the time of his first trip to Palestine, he had just completed a project on El Salvador. In 1999 he published his first book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Then, Palestine. Towell's point of view has always been one with roots in the defense of the underdog and the victims. The background of human situations photographed in No Man's Land is a landscape of destruction and chaos, except for the high concrete wall separating the Israeli and Palestinian populations. As in "El Salvador," a project that was also published as a book with the same title in 1997, Towell's siding with what he identifies as the victims (although the violence that some of them generate is also shown) is a platform to send a message of peace. Unfortunately this message is not as obvious in the Toronto exhibition as it is in the book and in the Paris exhibition where artifacts such as broken slings and posters by pro-peace Israeli-Palestinian groups were displayed. Another example of Towell's peace message is the closing panoramic photograph of the book which shows two pigeons, easily readable as substitutes for doves--and, as such, metaphors for peace--soaring against the threatening background of the Wall. Towell composed the image by locating the two birds on the top left strong point of the image while showing a minaret looming over the Wall in the top right strong point. The Wall separates the minaret from the birds resulting in an interesting, ambiguously composed closing image.

The Stephen Bulger Gallery, for reasons probably guided by its restricted space for wide photographs, chose the most pictorial images (because of the obvious distress of the subjects, one cannot speak of "picturesque" here) in a selection of works made from 1993 to 2004. A fascinating visual element in Towell's new work is his use of a new format. Large panoramic images are interspaced with the usual rectangular images whose 2" X 3" proportions inform the viewer of their 35mm origin. The ultra-wide format has been used by other Magnum photographers who have successfully let go of their Leicas for panoramic 35mm and medium-format cameras. The most prominent example is Josef Koudelka, a colleague and close friend of Towell's. Beyond the use of the panoramic format, even the subjects and compositions of Towell's 35mm images in No Man's Land evoke Koudelka and the unforgettable images he took in Prague during the Russian invasion of spring 1968. Towell has the same "in your face" approach as Koudelka, with his 35mm photographs. On the other hand, the dynamic panoramic views reflect his contemplative sense of analysis and recognition of space, timing and content. They are more controlled and carefully composed. The elements of the entropic war-zone landscape along with the witness and evidence of man's negative impulses and planned destruction, convey the same sense of eminent doom and "modern sublime" as Koudelka's work in Chaos (1999).

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Such exhibitions as the one on display at the Stephen Bulger Gallery echo a trend that has been getting more momentum recently, namely fine art galleries showing the work that has more in common with photo-journalism than museum artifacts. There are certainly, within the reportage genre, images whose content reaches beyond anecdote, and news. Such photographs provoke deeper reflections and deal with recurrent issues that have plagued Mankind as long as one can go back in history. The question here is whether the chosen location of display, a private fine-art gallery, and the graphic, pictorial treatment of the information contained in the photographs, serve the original purpose that motivated the photographer's work; in other words, whether the exhibition of such images in a gallery, and their reformatting for the occasion, do not interfere with their content. Their message might be corrupted by the context, which includes the gallery "space" and the expectations of their audience. This may be just a rhetorical question but are we definitely living in a culture where everything has become a spectacle, including information and art. After all, hasn't Andy Warhol's caustic art generated strange off-shoots with such artists as Jeff Koons or Damien Hirst? The abundance of images and means of information, as well as the concentration of their means of dissemination, has generated a real shift in our approach to art and information. Creating and feeding consumers has become the raison d'etre of commerce at the expense of quality and content. On the other hand there is an interesting phenomenon to observe: art galleries are now compensating for the increasing lack of informative content sold by news media more preoccupied by their announcers than their original audiences. Because of these underlying issues, its visual and esthetic qualities, as well as the depth and humanism of its content, "No Man's Land" is definitely an event that is well worth a visit and a thought.

BRUNO CHALIFOUR is a freelance critic and photographer, educator and Ph.D candidate.