The History War

GOST Books, 2024

$95.00 | 372 pages

Larry Towell’s 372-page book, The History War, challenges notions of what war and conflict images should be and what a photo book can be. It has no table of contents, no page numbers, no index, few captions, almost no white space, and not much text. In some layouts, horizontal images run edge to edge in this vertical book so you have to turn the book to see the images. It is confusing, jumbled, messy, and personal. Like war is. It is visually cacophonic. Like war is. It is immersive and demands involvement. Like war does. It is not linear. Like war never is. It has no clear resolution. Like war seldom does. 

It may just be my favorite photobook. 

This is not The History of War. It is The History War. Ukraine’s war. A legacy of conflict and a fierce determination for independence that dates to 1237 when the Moguls first invaded and extends to 2025 and the ongoing Russian invasion. The book is also the 10-year history of Towell’s involvement with Ukraine. He first visited in 2014 almost by chance during the Maidan uprising, where he photographed the final days of the clashes between protestors and police in Kyiv. 

He returned to Ukraine multiple times as the conflict evolved, capturing its shifting realities. The book is structured into six chapters, each corresponding to a different stage of his journey—Maidan Kyiv, Chernobyl, Donbass, ATO, The Separatists, and The Russian Invasion. 

Each chapter begins with a page of text partly historical and partly diaristic. As a nice design touch, the facing page features a still life image of objects heavy with symbolism: a wooden handmade shield, a 1954 Soviet recruitment poster, an exploded shell from a destroyed factory, a victory poster, and artwork created by refugee children. Other eclectic still life images are scattered throughout the book, such as old gas masks on green stands, a salvaged fur hat, and a melancholy two-page spread of a single red rose dropped onto the snow. By whom we don’t know.

The other pages of this book are crammed with Towell’s war images, or photographs of his journal pages that contain his photos, found photos, and ephemera.  The items in the journal pages are affixed with masking tape onto which Towell has written notes. The objects he collected—left behind in the debris of destroyed buildings or abandoned by fleeing Ukrainians—are almost as revealing as his photographs. He picked up items such as maps, stamps, postcards, family photographs, ID cards, a computer keyboard, a playing card featuring a semi-nude woman, found photographs, airline baggage stickers, an old airmail letter, a crumbled Nescafe cup, and a strip of stamps featuring military men from the Crimean War of 1854.

The book opens with a striking 26-page history of Ukraine, presented as a collage of objects taped to the pages with masking tape. Over this assemblage, Towell has meticulously layered a historical timeline, tracing Ukraine’s long and tumultuous past. We learn that the name Ukraine was first recorded in the 12th century, that the Mongols invaded in 1237, Russia’s first takeover began in 1772, the first  conflict with Russia came in 1853 with the Crimean War, and that the Ukrainian War for Independence in 1917 established Ukraine as a Republic which became part of the old USSR. Bringing history to the present, Towell notes that by the time the book went to press, following Russia’s invasion in 2022, 17.6 million Ukrainians were in need of humanitarian aid, with 5 million internally displaced and 8 million seeking refuge across Europe.

Unlike much of Towell’s previous work, this book blends both black-and-white and color photography. The color images often feel diaristic—intimate glimpses of people and places encountered along his journey. Some resemble smartphone snapshots: fragments of war debris, impromptu portraits of civilians, or empty interiors. But then, in the way that paging through this book feels like a treasure hunt, you come across a color image on a double page spread of 60-year old Klimenko Nikolay wounded in the shelling of his home labeled as “Hospital #21” and you are gobsmacked by Towell’s brilliance. In this haunting image, Nikolay sits hunched on an old mattress draped in an army-green blanket, his head bowed and his hand obscuring his face. A crutch leans against the bed. The stark side lighting fractures the space behind him into geometric blocks of tan, brown, and pale blue, evoking the abstract compositions of Mondrian. It is a moment of quiet devastation—both intimate and inscrutable, much like the book itself.

The black-and-white images of war and conflict in The History War are intense, raw, and unfiltered. Some become even more immersive through expansive four-page fold-out panoramas, sucking the viewer into scenes of chaos and uncertainty. These images are the antithesis of the hyper-stylized, oversaturated aesthetic often seen in war photography meant for contests; instead, they embrace the disarray and ambiguity of conflict. One such spread unfolds to reveal a woman in the center of and at the very edge of the frame, so close it feels as if you could reach out and touch her. Her face is marked by confusion and anguish as she stands amid old tires, scattered debris, and soldiers. Around her, men sift through the wreckage, their intent unclear—are they searching for survivors or salvaging remnants of destruction? In another, a chilling composition fills the page. To the right, what appear to be body bags stacked in heaps, an unsettling mass of loss. In the center, men are at work, their figures slightly blurred as they dig, surrounded by dusk and thick smoke. The air itself seems heavy, pressing against the scene, making it almost suffocating. 

The book’s six chapters mirror the history of Ukraine’s ongoing conflict, and reflect Towell’s experiences documenting the chronicle of destruction, survival, and resilience. After his first trip to Kyiv during the the Maidan uprising, his focus shifts to the haunting emptiness of Chernobyl, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. These images capture the eerie remnants of a place abandoned in haste: “family albums scattered on the floor alongside vodka bottles.” 

In “Donbass,” embedded at different times with both the Ukrainian army and the separatists, Towell explores a “no man’s land of debris and damaged souls.” With the help of a Ukrainian contact known as Cowboy, Towell searches for “tributes to an old Empire”, the countless crumbling monuments commemorating WWII and empty pedestals where Vladimir Lenin once stood larger than life. He found one in a construction equipment yard partially buried beneath tree branches, with Lenin’s foot painted with the colors of independent Ukraine, a silent act of defiance.

In the chapter ATO (Anti-Terrorist Organization), the tone shifts again. Towell documents his time in Bakhmut and his interactions with Ukrainian playwright Alik Sardarian. Here, the images feel more personal—portraits of smiling soldiers, barracks filled with camaraderie, children’s drawings pinned to walls, wounded soldiers in hospital beds, and decorated veterans. Yet Towell’s writing undercuts these moments: “The vodka I mentioned earlier helps me wash down the boiled potatoes in the rancid-smelling kitchen, the walls of which are papered with children’s drawings of flowers, houses, and tanks.”

By the time he reaches Donetsk in The Separatists, the landscape has transformed into something unrecognizable. “Cold, dark, and snowy,” Towell writes. The city is hollowed out, half its population gone, the ones who remain seeking refuge in “black mildew-covered basement bomb shelters.” The photographs become harsher—bunkers, obliterated homes, and deeply unsettling target practice setups, one with the targets pasted onto nude female mannequins and another where the female mannequin becomes the target, with circles drawn on breasts and abdomen to indicate where the shots should be aimed.  

Finally, the narrative leaps forward to 2022 and the full-scale Russian invasion where Towell photographs what remains: bodies left in the streets, mass graves hastily dug, burned-out tanks, mortar shells, and, in one abandoned Russian trench, an acoustic guitar left behind like a ghost of something human.

The book’s design is a final layer of meaning. It was printed in two color variations: a yellow cover with blue endpapers, or a blue cover with yellow endpapers—the colors of Ukraine’s flag. My copy has a yellow cover and is textured like the canvas of a journal. The title, The History War, and Towell’s name are embossed in silver, while Ukraine is embossed only in yellow, nearly invisible against the yellow background—a quiet yet potent metaphor for Russia’s attempt to erase its identity.

–Review by Michelle Bogre

Michelle Bogre, Professor Emerita, Parsons School of Design, is a teacher, copyright lawyer, documentary photographer and author of four books: Photography As Activism: Images for Social Change, Photography 4.0: A Teaching Guide for the 21st Century, Documentary Photography Reconsidered: History, Theory and Practice, and The Routledge Companion to Copyright and Creativity in the 21st Century. She regularly lectures, writes and teaches workshops on copyright and photography. Her photographs and/or writings have been published in books, including the Time-Life Annual Photography series, The Family of Women, Beauty Bound, The Design Dictionary and photographer Trey Ratcliffe’s monograph, Light Falls like Bits. She is currently trying to finish a long term documentary project on family farms, published on Instagram as @thefarmstories.