When it comes to feature photos, the more you drive the luckier you’ll get. Tim Smith learned that lesson one crisp spring day in 2009, when he was searching for something — anything — worth photographing. He needed to find a day picture to fill space on the pages of the Brandon Sun newspaper in Manitoba, Canada. Unfortunately, nothing much was happening in his corner of western Manitoba.
He headed down a gravel country road, where he caught a glimpse of a group of women wearing homemade traditional Hutterite dresses and black head scarves. He was aware that in Manitoba there were colonies of Hutterites, who, like the Amish and the Mennonites, come from the Anabaptist Christian tradition and live an intentionally simple and self-sufficient life. But they keep to themselves, and Mr. Smith had seen them only on rare occasions when they shopped in town.
He stopped to take pictures as they worked in a communal garden.
“I pulled over and started chatting with them, and took some terrible photos of them gardening,” he said. “Then one of the girls pulled out a flip phone from her dress and started taking a picture of me taking pictures of them. That challenged what I thought about them.”
The photo filled the space in the paper — but the girl taking his photo made Mr. Smith want to learn more about the Hutterites. He talked to the group’s minister, the Rev. Tom Hofer, and asked if he might be able to document his colony.
“Hutterites don’t really have anything to gain to have their story told,” Mr. Smith, 36, said. “They are insular by nature. They survived 400-plus years specifically by being separate from mainstream society.”
Mr. Hofer was not interested in being in the news media, but he was interested in teaching people about life in a Hutterite colony. Mr. Smith discovered that the colonies, which consist of 60 to 150 residents, are almost entirely self-sufficient — growing their food, making their clothes and building their homes. While one is expected to work and carry on the faith and tradition, everything including meals and housing is taken care of “from the cradle to the grave,” Mr. Smith said. In the Hutterite colonies that he photographed in Manitoba, people live communally, eat meals together and life revolves around the church.
Hutterites came to the Dakotas from Russia in the 1800s and spread to the western United States and Canada. Their first language is a low German dialect, but they also speak English fluently. They are mainly farmers, but some colonies are starting to go into manufacturing. For much of the last six years, Mr. Smith has focused on the Deerboine colony where Mr. Hofer lives.
At first, it was difficult to persuade some of the members to open up. Six months into the project, Mr. Hofer’s wife died in a car accident, sending the family and community into grief. Mr. Smith attended the funeral and spent a lot of time with the family, becoming closer to the colony.
“It’s not just a photographer-subject relationship,” he said. “These people are my friends.”
Mr. Smith visited Deerboine and other nearby colonies hundreds of times, sometimes taking his wife, Natalie, and son, Huxley, now 10, who enjoyed playing with the Hutterite children.
Life in the colonies was far removed from Mr. Smith’s upbringing, but it was the similarities, especially among the children, that most interested him. Conformity is the ideal — the women wear homemade prairie dresses and men wear plaid shirts and suspenders — but you can catch glimpses of self-expression, especially among the young people, Mr. Smith said.
“Whether it’s a hoodie or pink sneakers bought in town or brightly colored hair clips, young people are looking for where they fit into the world,” he said.
The question of how much computer access is appropriate is often debated, but some Hutterites now have smartphones, which they use for farming and other business. This also allows the younger members more connections to other colonies and the outside world.
When they finish school at 18, some of the young people leave the colony to explore the world. Some work in oil patches or move to nearby cities. In his experience, Mr. Smith said, most return to the colony.
“The outside world is difficult,” he said. “You have to pay your own bills, find a job and a place to live. On the Hutterite colony, everything is taken care of for you. And everyone is like family.”
Many photographers feel they have to leave home and go halfway across the world to find a big story, Mr. Smith said, but there are usually many experienced photographers who know the territory better and will outshoot them.
He believes in finding a story close to home to sink your teeth in.
Sometimes, all it takes is driving down an unexplored road.
“I like working on a small paper and being out in the country where I’m covering stories that I’m the only one working on them,” he said.
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