El Salvador

A deeply compelling look at a tumultuous country, Larry Towell's photographs are at once powerful and compassionate, revealing a country of violence, heartbreak, strength, and dignity.

Magnum photographer Larry Towell first traveled to El Salvador in 1986 as a member of a human rights delegation. Since the beginning of the civil war in 1979, 50,000 people had been killed, 25 percent of the population were refugees, and death squads terrorized the nation. The war ended in the early 1990s and Towell had thoroughly documented both the war and its aftermath.

Towell is perhaps one of the finest photojournalists since Cartier-Bresson. In these haunting photographs, we see a world in which everyone becomes a combatant and every place a war zone. Yet amid the brutality and death there is a harsh beauty people grieve and move on; peasant women wash clothes and nurse infants under the eyes of soldiers; children with hopeful faces forage the dumpsites for food. 62 duotones