The Mennonites [Hardcover]

Time seems not to have served the Mennonites well. Apart from occasional, but continuing, conflicts over their pacifism and refusal to adapt, their work ethic and sense of community allowed them to prosper until the first half of the twentieth century. The age of the machine however seems almost to have been a conflict too far for this people out of time. Now spread widely across both the North and South American continents, their four hundred year diaspora continues as the differing groups attempt to cope with the world of the new millennium. Towell’s first contact was with a dispossessed Mennonite migrant family. Photography is frowned upon in the Mennonite code but the photographer built a bond of trust which overcame this hurdle. Alterations in trade agreements between bordering geographical nations, and the Mennonites own exponentially increasing population, have brought forth unwanted, unsought and unwelcome changes to their traditional way of life. Fierce traditionalists, the Mennonites speak a “Low German” dialect and their written language is principally restricted to scriptural texts in “High German”, which in turn accounts for considerable illiteracy. Their past was based around agricultural expertise, hard work and land ownership but today much of the Mennonite Nation bears closer resemblance to the dust bowl migrant workers of the thirties witnessed in the photography of the Farm Security Administration.

Towell pulls no punches in his vivid descriptions of this people he has come to love. Far from any sanitised Hollywood representation of a pious, plain cloth wearing religious community that shuns the twenty-first century Towell clearly exposes them to the public gaze. The Mennonites have many of the social problems recognised or ignored by other societies. Alcoholism for example, the disease of the destitute, appears not to have passed them by untended and their attitude to modern medicine doesn’t help them. There are still colonies where the horse and buggy reigns supreme. In others electricity is shunned and the single concession to mechanisation is elderly iron wheeled John Deere tractors. The itinerant migrant families cross the continent in overloaded, unlicensed, elderly flat bed trucks; moving from one farm to the next picking and planting their way for illegally low salaries. Officialdom in Canada, Mexico and the USA either turns a blind eye to their plight or, in the case of only slightly more socially elevated US Border Guards, “treats them like trash”.

This beautifully produced book comes elegantly cloth bound in black along with a slipcase to contain it’s narrative. Black seems apposite, both for the piety of the people it describes and the manner in which they are ignored or abused by the inhabitants of a century more civilised than the one in which they choose to live. Larry Towell, proving himself as articulate with the pen as he is with the Leica, offers his reader a considered, intimate and honest insight into the joys and hardships of this invisible nation. Highly recommended.

The print quality of this book renders the work of this master photographer as a washed out, lifeless dirge of endless shades of grey. The range of tones in many of the pictures are of newspaper quality while some are much worse. Hugely disappointing.

Buy 'Wintereisse' instead by the same publisher, which is the exact opposite - a work of art, it brings drab and forsaken environments alive with emotion and awash with beautiful muted colour.