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Larry Towell’s El Salvador gathers a decade of photography shaped by the country’s civil war and its aftermath. Towell first travelled there in 1986 with a human-rights delegation and completed the extended reportage in 1996. Published the following year, the book looks beyond a single phase of combat: its subject is also the prolonged pressure that political violence placed on ordinary lives, both during the conflict and after the fighting ended.

The historical setting is stark. The civil war had begun in 1979; by the time of Towell’s first visit, tens of thousands had been killed, a quarter of the population had become refugees, and death squads were terrorising the country. His photographs attend to this pervasive condition rather than separating battlefield from domestic life. Soldiers watch as women wash clothes and nurse children; elsewhere, children search dumpsites for food. Grief and endurance occupy the same social landscape.

That proximity gives the work its particular force. Towell’s approach combines the alertness of photojournalism with sustained attention to people continuing the routines of survival. The images do not reduce El Salvador to violence alone, yet neither do they allow everyday activity to soften the brutality surrounding it. The resulting account encompasses combatants and civilians, public conflict and intimate consequence, preserving the dignity of its subjects without turning hardship into consolation.

Mark Danner’s introduction places the photographs within a written framework, making the volume a collaboration between visual reportage and historical interpretation. Issued in 1997 by the Center for Documentary Studies in association with W.W. Norton, this 127-page hardcover records a long-form project at the point of its completion. For collectors of documentary photography, its importance lies in that sustained span: one photographer’s close engagement with a society passing from civil war into its unsettled aftermath, presented as a coherent book rather than a collection of isolated news images.