Larry Towell first came to know the Old Colony Mennonites not as an assignment but as neighbours near his home in Ontario, and that proximity shapes everything in this book. Between 1990 and 1999 he photographed Mennonite communities in rural Canada and Mexico, returning often enough that the work reads less like reportage than like a long acquaintance set down in black and white. His own diary notes and remembered fragments run alongside the photographs, so the sequence moves between image and written recollection rather than separating them.

The subject is a people who hold to a way of life by moving. Successive Mennonite communities have migrated across countries to keep their own terms with the modern world, and Towell’s pictures register the cost of that decision: hard rural labour, poverty, land hunger, religious discipline and its contradictions. He was granted access few outsiders receive, and the photographs carry the plainness of the communities themselves rather than the drama of a visiting eye.

The book was first published in 2000 and became a landmark of Towell’s career. This revised second edition, published by GOST Books in 2022, re-edits and re-sequences the project and adds forty previously unpublished photographs drawn from the photographer’s archive. At 288 pages, clothbound in a slipcase with a black ribbon, it presents the work as a considered object rather than a file of images.

For collectors, the case rests on the decade of access, the pairing of photographs with the photographer’s own writing, and the fact that this edition reshapes a body of work already widely regarded. The expanded sequence and the newly included frames make it a substantial version of the project in print.