Photographing the Amish

Photographing the Amish I (captured pigeon)
Taxidermied pigeon, wire basket

I met an Amish boy who had just captured a pigeon in an upturned bicycle basket. He and the pigeon looked at me mutely when I stumbled across them in a goat barn. You are not allowed to photograph the Amish and knowing this has burnt images from my meetings with them into my mind.

I asked Elva, an Amish woman how she remembered particular events where non-Amish people might use photography. She looked at me as though I was crazy and said “we just remember them”.


Photographing the Amish II (the difference)
vinyl lettering


Photographing the Amish III (re-enacted barn raising)
re-enacted sound (wood, corrugated metal, nails), chair, speakers, mp3 player, ink drawing

We stood and watched an Amish barn raising. Fifty or so men and boys clung in blue dungarees on the scaffold of a huge two storey barn, working. Nails were driven into planks by three men kneeling on a bench of piled breeze blocks, the planks were carried away by someone else, then hoisted into place and nailed down by a team of others. The sound was three-dimensional. Fifty hammers hitting fifty nails into the wooden skeleton of the barn. I didn’t close my eyes but if I had I bet I would still have seen it from the huge, hollow, acoustic shape of the hammers hitting.