Jake Michaels made c.1950 in Belize, among Mennonite communities whose families left other places for the chance to keep their own customs and have stayed for some seventy years. His photographs follow the ordinary texture of that decision: fields and grazing land, the burning of brush to open ground for families not yet arrived, buggies on dirt roads where children hold the reins with unexpected authority. Setanta Books published the series in 2021 as a first edition, 96 pages, 50 images, 25.5 by 26.5 centimeters, hardcover with a belly band.

The title carries the book’s central suggestion rather than a date. Michaels found in this landscape an agricultural order that recalled the American Midwest of the 1950s, and the pictures hold that impression alongside the evidence of a community living now. Sun, fire, deep green hills, and the quiet of a working day pass through the sequence without hurry. Portraits and reportage share the pages; the camera moves between homesteads without turning the Mennonites into spectacle or argument.

The photographs are Michaels’s, and the book is built around that single sustained attention to place. The size gives the landscape room while keeping the work close to the hand. The belly band, the modest page count, and the even distribution of the images make it an object to be read slowly rather than a survey.

For collectors following contemporary documentary photography, c.1950 shows a photographer working at a remove from the news cycle: patient, formally restrained, curious about how belief shapes daily labor and how children inherit it. It sits well beside other recent monographs concerned with enclave communities, yet its subject and its midwestern resemblance are its own.