Larry Towell, NO MAN’S LAND, 2005

This is photographer and journalist Larry Towell’s documentary account of the Palestinians. It reveals the landscape of a scarred and battered “no man’s land” – the area that calls itself Palestine and Israel, but which is neither fully – and the daily lives of the people who live there. Photographed over a period of ten years and completed with the support of the prestigious Henri Cartier-Bresson Award (with Towell as its first recipient, in 2003), this is Towell’s most important body of work to date and a landmark of photographic art and journalism. Towell describes the physical and psychological walls that divide Palestinians from Israelis and a land divided against itself. As Towell relates in an excerpt from the book, “Today, the little that remains of Palestinian land has been cut to ribbons by a military infrastructure of settlement roads, checkpoints, watch-towers, security gates, walls and weapons, guaranteeing Israel’s ultimate control and extending it to satellite settlements, the purpose of which is clearly expansionist. By granting Israel enough political immunity to flout international law, the U.S. has helped turn it into a pariah, condemned by the world community.” Towell illustrates this through his black and white photographs, many of them epic panoramas, which are simultaneously sad, haunting, breathtaking and beautiful. With a foreword by Robert Delpire.