Amery Sandford

Ali Postman, Portrait d’une Fille.

Canadian photojournalist Larry Towell has seen more than his share of human suffering. From the conflicts of the ’80s in Latin America to present day Afghanistan and Haiti, Towell doesn’t shy away from photographing some of humanity’s most heart-wrenching moments.

Despite the heady content of his portfolio, always in black-and-white, Towell’s images resonate with a poetic beauty, capturing small moments of life among disaster, pauses in the chaos. As part of this year’s sprawling Exposure Calgary Banff Canmore Photography Festival, Towell will make a presentation of his body of work, complete with his own video, music and poetry.

“It will be kind of an experiment in a way,” he says. “It’s just a presentation of Larry Towell, I guess — the photographs, the writing and the music.”

Towell first started shooting during the ’80s, when Ronald Regan was “attempting to turn all of Latin America, Central America, into a smouldering landscape.” Reading human-rights reports and documenting the conflicts hooked Towell and never let him go. But unlike most photographers who try to distance themselves from their subjects, Towell thrives on the connections. “I think if I had to separate the two, I wouldn’t be a photographer. I’m a photographer because that allows me to enter other people’s lives. I’m not a photographer in order to remain distant or aloof. If I was a fashion photographer I would be, but that’s not what I do.”

It’s not just about the underbelly of humanity at this year’s festival, however. Exposure has grown from modest beginnings to a wide-reaching and diverse event with enough exhibitions to fill even the largest of memory sticks.

Craig Richards, chair of the festival board and curator of photography at the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies in Banff, started Exposure seven years ago with Diane Bos, with nine venues. This year the festival will encompass 30 venues across Calgary and the Bow Valley.

Richards also runs the Through the Lens program, putting cameras into the eager teenage hands of Bow Valley students. The results, year after year, are shockingly good. This year, the student exhibition will feature the work of aboriginal students from Morley.

“What I do over the course of that time period, I do darkroom demonstrations, I bring in photographers to talk about their work, we do field trips, critique sessions. They [the students] learn how to develop negatives, they learn how to make contact sheets, they learn how to print, but, more important, they learn how to see. They learn how to slow down and see,” says Richards.

“Anybody that has seen a Through the Lens exhibition is pretty stunned.”

Throughout Calgary, photography fans can stop at the Art Gallery of Calgary to get a rare glimpse of works from the National Portrait Gallery, or puzzle at the wide-ranging contemporary Japanese exhibition Counter-Photography, at Triangle Gallery. The Weiss Gallery’s presentation of Michael Levin features work that is as sparse and stunning as black-and-white scenic photography can be, and Skew Gallery takes fairy tales and turns them upside down in Scenes From a Secret World by Amalie Atkins.

While the festival celebrates every facet of photography, from the surreal to the real, from digital to film, Towell, for one, is sticking with traditional shooting methods.

“I’ve been looking at the work coming out of Haiti and it almost looks like it’s all been taken by the same photographer, even though there’s hundreds of photographers,” says Towell, who was quite affected by the earthquake zone. “I’ve never seen so much, I don’t know, human suffering in such a concentrated place and time.”

Towell prefers to do things the old-fashioned way, working with film and immersing his hands in darkroom chemicals. Digital photography, he says, is holding people back. “I’m not sure that digital photography has actually improved photography; I think it might be the opposite,” he says.

“There’s nothing better than a fibre photographic print.”

In the Rockies

Performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s The End is on display in the Walter Phillips Gallery at The Banff Centre. Give yourself about a half-hour to experience the full loop and let the deadpan Nordic humour and melancholy seep in.

The video installation was shot in the Rockies and features Kjartansson and his collaborator, Davíd Thór Jónsson, playing various instruments in five frigid “wilderness” locations. Sidle up to the speakers to catch the crystal clear recordings in each location.

Lines is a photographic exhibition of extreme mountain adventure by Dan Hudson at The Edge Gallery in Canmore. These images of outstanding skiers and boarders framed in spectacular landscapes, such as snowboarder Andrew Hardingham hanging in the air above the frozen waterfall at Johnston Canyon, have earned the Canmore artist an international reputation in the world of sport photography.

Other haunting images include Sarah Fuller’s House Beard, from her personal series focusing on Iceland at the Elevation 1309 Gallery in Canmore, and Thomas Kaquitts’s My Grandpa, Sitting-Wind, in the exhibition Through the Lens — a celebration of the successful photography program for high school kids from Morley — at the Juniper Hotel in Banff.

Katherine Ylitalo