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.

Larry Towell has taken photographs throughout Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas

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 co-operatives, 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.

He moved on to Guatemala, where he documented soldiers, protesters and relatives of the “disappeared”—people who’d been abducted and likely murdered by government forces. In El Salvador, he boarded an old school bus bound for the far side of the river, occupied by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, known as the FMLN. When government soldiers searched the vehicle, Towell crawled onto the roof. Nobody inside said a word. When they crossed the river, he found himself in guerrilla country. He spoke to campesinos and FMLN fighters who came into town and loitered in the streets. And he photographed them.

In 1988, Towell sent his shots to the world-renowned Magnum agency. That year, he became their first Canadian client, and his images soon appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone and Life. His agents encouraged him to move to Paris or New York to attend gallery openings and schmooze with editors. He refused. Instead, he bought a 75-acre farm along the banks of the Sydenham. He and his wife, Ann, raised four children among the cornstalks, gravel roads and farmhouses. He regularly flew out to Mexico, to Afghanistan, to Palestine, to Ukraine—returning to the same places over and over, getting to know the people and trying to make sense of what he witnessed. When he was done, he’d always come back to the river.

Towell is now one of Canada’s most acclaimed photographers, his body of work rife with questions of land and landlessness. “Land makes us into who we are,” he once said in an interview. “If we lose it, we forfeit a little bit of our souls, which we’ll spend the rest of our lives trying to regain.” Here, Towell shares the stories behind some of his most indelible images.

Mandan, North Dakota, 2016: “I went to Standing Rock four or five times as part of a project on landlessness among First Nations. The Sioux Nation was trying to prevent the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, and thousands of people were living in a protest camp near Cannon Ball. I shot this photo at the camp around Mother’s Day. A few minutes later, the police began grabbing and arresting people.”

San Salvador, El Salvador, 1991: “I was walking around a cemetery, and this mother had come to grieve her son, who’d been killed by death squads, likely paid for by the U.S. government. They picked up students or union people and tortured them to death, then left the bodies in the street, often carved with the squad’s initials. That’s her son’s grave on the left. She’d been crying, and her daughter was comforting her. All of a sudden, she fainted.”

Kabul, Afghanistan, 2011: “I was walking around this refugee camp with a local colleague when we came across this one-armed child. She had lived in Helmand province, where her village had been hit by American bombs. She doesn’t remember a thing: she woke up only to find that she’d lost her arm, along with members of her family. Most of the young women there were very shy, but she’d been reduced to begging on the streets, so she was used to strangers.”

Durango, Mexico, 1994: “I worked with the Old Colony Mennonites for 10 years, both here in Ontario and in Mexico, where there were about 25 different colonies. In Durango colony, on Sunday mornings, everybody would go to church and then, after, the teenagers would walk these dirt roads, flirting or sometimes drinking. A lot of Mexico is desert and very sandy. As these teenage girls ran by me, a big gust of wind came up and started blowing the sand around.”

New York City, 2001: “I was in Manhattan when the World Trade Center was hit. I followed the smoke to the base of the towers, where a priest gathered people to pray, and to the right I noticed clothes hanging on a stoplight in the shape of a cross. Afterwards, the fire department gathered to enter one of the buildings. I was going to follow them, but didn’t. Later, I found out that the tower came down and killed them all.”

Kyiv, Ukraine, 2014:“In 2013, Ukrainians were pushing for stronger ties with Europe, but the president at the time, Viktor Yanukovych, sided with Russia on trade and other issues. The Euromaidan protests erupted as a result. I got to Kyiv about three months in. On this day, the police had driven demonstrators back from the parliament buildings with tear gas and rubber bullets. This young woman walked the line of shields, touching them and praying. By nightfall, protesters were burning tires and wooden pallets, even throwing Molotov cocktails at the police. Then the police threw a live grenade back. It hit the person beside me.”

Gaza, 1993:“This was my first trip to Gaza. It was Ramadan, so people were fasting all day, and there were fewer clashes with the military occupying the strip. I was working with a Palestinian. He had a car, so we were driving around. Some kids play cops and robbers. These kids were playing Palestinians and Israelis. I got out of the car and took a photograph—I didn’t know if it was any good. And then it won the World Press Photo of the Year. All of a sudden, everybody in the photo and magazine worlds knew who I was.”

Hebron, West Bank, 2003:“On this day, I was walking around by myself through Hebron, which was under constant closure—people couldn’t go out of their homes, the streets were empty, the IDF was raiding houses. This woman was walking down the street with a baby, and that tank swung its cannon toward her. To the left, the children on the street started throwing rocks at it.”

Zacatecas, Mexico, 1992: “This was my first trip to a Mennonite colony in Mexico. It was very small, in the desert, and the water table was dropping every year. One of my neighbours, Peter Dyck, was from that colony and had driven me there. This was his parents’ house. We were having instant coffee and bread with jam. They got up to go outside and left me with this child. I’m sure she’s all grown up now, but I don’t know where she is—she may still live there, or she may be in Canada somewhere.”

Donbas, Ukraine, 2016: “Second from the left, that’s my friend Alik. I met him at the Euromaidan uprising in 2014. He was stationed in Donbas, in eastern Ukraine, and we drove around to these small Ukrainian bunkers along the border. The guy in the middle of this group picture, Mikhilo, had pretty severe PTSD. He’d been on the frontline for a while and had almost died a couple times. He tried to live a normal civilian life but ultimately couldn’t. So he went back to the frontline.”

Various places, 2014: “America went into Afghanistan after 9/11, so I opened my book Afghanistan with a couple of photographs from that day—the frame at the very bottom on the left of the contact sheet, with the white square around it, is the priest in Manhattan. On the other side is a collage I made on a scanner from the artifacts I picked up, mostly in Afghanistan, at the market or in the field: a military hat, Russian pins, a belt buckle, some rusted shells.”

This story appears in the November 2025 issue ofMaclean’s*.* You can subscribe to the magazine here or send a gift subscription here.