The Magnum photographer talks about meeting followers of the Christian sect in Canada and Mexico in the 90s, just as modernity was encroaching on their way of life
In 1990, Larry Towell began photographing a Mennonite family who lived in a dilapidated house down the road from him in Lambton County, Ontario. “I didn’t go looking for them,” he says. “I came across them right in my own back yard.”
Mennonites are a nonconformist Christian denomination dating back to the 16th century. They have traditionally lived apart from mainstream society in self-sustaining colonies, the most conservative communities resisting all forms of modernisation, including machinery and electricity. In the long, evocative essay he wrote for his photo book, The Mennonites, first published in 2000, and now about to be reissued in reedited form, Towell describes how the members of the Old Colony sect he encountered had travelled there from a long-established community in La Batea, Mexico, in search of seasonal work in the fields and orchards of Ontario. “I liked them a lot because they seemed otherworldly and therefore completely vulnerable in a society in which they did not belong and for which they were not prepared. Because I liked them, they liked me and although photography was forbidden, they let me photograph them. That’s all there was to it.”
Kent County, Ontario,1996.
