Amish life

In Indiana’s Amish country, families work, play, and worship much as they have since they arrived in the 1800s. Here there are few modern-day conveniences to distract people from the important tasks of living plainly and serving their God. In this lovely book, well-known photographer Darryl D. Jones captures the spirit of the Amish people, their land, and their daily lives. Jones’s photographs are at once inspiring and intimate, expressive of the landscape and those who work the land. They do show the Amish as many have come to see them—plowing a field behind a team of horses, going to market in a black buggy, and dressed in suspenders and plain smocks. But Jones’s photographs go beyond tourist caricature. In them we glimpse faces lined by hard work and wrinkled with pleasure; tasks performed in ways that seem timeless and tasks done with the aid of modern machinery; young people who make a sport of harvest and join eagerly in a game of baseball. In them we glimpse as well the deep satisfaction of living in harmony with the rhythms of life.