Over 20 years since the publication’s release, a reworked edition has been launched by the London-based Gost Books. The impetus to revisit the project, though, was not to reframe the original story in relation to burning contemporary issues. Instead, Towell’s motives are more conservative, underlining an attention to careful photo-editing and resequencing: “The challenge lies in how to maintain flow; how to go from one image to the next and have it make sense… how an image can suggest something that isn’t there. It’s a challenge I enjoy.”
Sifting through an astonishing 20,000 prints with publisher Stuart Smith, Towell brought 40 previously unseen images into the rework: “It’s the resurrection of a project I was very close to, but a very labour-intensive process.” Looking back at The Mennonites also invites reference to a photographic landscape much changed in recent decades. Shot entirely in analogue over a 10-year span, and published widely in print magazines, Towell’s project recalls a lost age of slower, more considered visual storytelling, a far cry from today’s snappy, knee-jerk online world.
Towell laments the “self-destructive, self-obsessed” nature of social media; symptomatic of an industry bottleneck that sees “more photographers competing for the same small space”. In his bold convictions, Towell’s own traditional tendencies come to the fore – though like the Mennonites, he remains an unmistakable, if unconventional, part of the present. A member of Magnum Photos since 1988, Towell spent much of the 1980s in Cold War conflict zones, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras.
There is a distinct air of irony, then, to the manner in which the story of the Mennonites found him, with the seeds of what would become his most revered project – and certainly his most personal – taking root just a stone’s throw from his own front porch. “When the book first came out, I couldn’t get the Mennonites out of my system,” he reflects. “It was a project and a particular society of individuals with whom I was very close; a study of a people I like and respect.”
It is notable, too, that Towell’s ongoing photojournalistic works – following US-bound migrants fleeing gang violence in Central America, or more recently, documenting Russia’s ghastly war crimes in Ukraine – are rooted in those same territories the Mennonites passed through, dovetailing once more with their meandering history.