In 1974, the German photographer Timm Rautert came to America to photograph the Amish community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. The problem for Rautert was that, like cars and electricity, photography is shunned by the Amish, whose strict adherence to Biblical rules on image-making forbids them from posing for pictures. As a workaround, Rautert played Peeping Tom, shooting his less-than-willing subjects from a distance. This led, he writes, to a lot of “shy looks, undercover gestures, lowered heads, people fleeing my camera.”
Four years later, Rautert decided to give the photographing-those-very-uncomfortable-with-being-photographed thing another shot, this time in a Hutterite community in Alberta, Canada. After some debate in the community council about whether or not it was a sin to take photographs, they decided on a Solomonic compromise: while not allowing photography, they wouldn’t forbid it, either. Permission not quite granted, Rautert eventually got to work: > Not a fortnight, no, three weeks have already passed since my arrival; I should really start taking photographs. From time to time, I carefully pick up my rather small Leica M4—it is as black as my clothes. I begin in the dining hall so that everybody can see my little box. The women are seated on the left, the men on the right, three tables on either side. Although there are a couple of windows, the hall is very dark. The bulbs on the ceiling are only switched on in the evening and in winter. I always sit together with Michael, the preacher, the Säckelmann, and the teacher at the third table, the farthest in the back. I make an announcement at the table but get no reply, so I stand up and take one single picture. The spell is broken, but I felt very uncomfortable when taking it. Never before and never afterwards did I feel more superfluous as a photographer and, although nobody looked at me, I had the impression that they were all staring at me.
A recent book from Steidl brings Rautert’s black-and-white photographs of the Amish together with his vivid Kodachrome images of the Hutterites. Here’s a selection.
Photographs courtesy Timm Rautert/Steidl.
