Then Palestine gathers Larry Towell’s photographs from seven visits to the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem between 1993 and 1997. Published by Aperture in 1998, the book is anchored in a defined territory and a concentrated period of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its focus is not Palestine as an abstract political question, but the immediate human space in which occupation, resistance, bereavement, and fear are experienced.
Towell worked at close range, placing the camera amid streets, alleys, confrontations, and assemblies of mourners. The resulting images are direct without becoming diagrammatic. A hand gripping a stone enters the frame; a soldier pulls a child by the wrist; a grieving mother covers her face with a photograph of her dead, armed son. Such pictures locate political violence in gestures and relationships, showing how force reaches into family life and public ritual. Towell’s journal writing further situates the photographer inside these events, exposed to the same tense proximity that shapes the photographs.
The book’s historical weight derives from sustained observation rather than retrospective summary. Made over four years, the work records recurring conditions across three distinct Palestinian areas while preserving the instability of individual encounters. Towell does not resolve the conflict into a single emblem or explanatory argument. Instead, the accumulation of particular scenes establishes an eyewitness account in which grief, defiance, vulnerability, and surveillance remain uneasily adjacent.
For collectors of documentary photography, Then Palestine merits attention as a geographically precise, multi-year body of photojournalism brought into a coherent book form. Its significance lies in the meeting of political history and embodied witness: the larger conflict is registered through distance, movement, posture, and physical contact. Within a collection concerned with conflict photography, the Middle East, or the ethics of proximity, it offers a rigorous example of how a photobook can hold both documentary specificity and unresolved human tension.
