Many years ago, in the heart of the corn lands of Iowa, I spent what can only be described as an enchanted Saturday afternoon at a Mennonite country fair. There were displays of home produce, and wood-chopping contests, and games for children; groups of bonneted women tended open fires on which pots of apple butter were bubbling; in a marquee, a quilt-sewing bee was in progress. I had already caught fleeting glimpses of the Amish people of Iowa, trotting in their hearse-like black horse-and-buggies along dirt roads that ran beside the highway: two worlds, two ages, two utterly different concepts of what the Good Life should be. Compared to the Amish, in their forbidding black and white isolationism, the Mennonites seemed positively brimming with gaiety and the enjoyment of life. The sect is named after Menno Simons, a Dutch Catholic priest of the 16th century who left the Church to join the Anabaptists, and soon formed a movement of his own that practised strict pacifism and the separation of Church and State. Persecution drove the sect underground, yet it spread throughout Europe and, in the late 1600s, to North America. Now their largest settlements are in Canada and Mexico.
It is in these two countries, the former especially, that the Magnum photographer Larry Towell has spent years compiling a wonderful photographic portrait of these gentle, hard-working and intensely private people. Although more open to the world than the Amish, the Mennonites have a religious aversion to being photographed, and it is a tribute to Towell's dedication and obvious decency of spirit that they have come to trust him so well.
Towell's The Mennonites is a marvellous record of what is to us a strange yet strangely attractive-seeming way of life. He records, without sentimentality or prurience, but with gritty poeticism, the everyday life of the settlements. Looking at these pictures, one catches a glimpse of an Edenic world founded on worship, respect, and hard work, and marvels that it should still be managing to survive.
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor of The Irish Times and Chief Literary Critic