In the summer of 1890, Bertha Horack, a nineteen-year-old University of Iowa student, set out to photograph the Amana Colonies, the utopian religious community twenty miles northwest that she had visited several times before on summer visits with her family. She traveled by train with her beloved mother, Katherine Mosnat Horack, and presented the very picture of Victorian propriety. Yet everything else about the bright and ever curious Horack marked her as a woman ahead of her time. She was among the earliest social documentary photographers, mastering the behemoth view camera that had to be loaded with individual glass plate negatives measuring five-by-eight inches each. She found a market for her photographs and drawings by pairing them with freelance articles she wrote for illustrated magazines. She also published the most definitive history of the Amana Society in her 1908 book, “Amana: The Community of True Inspiration.”
Bertha Horack married political scientist Benjamin Shambaugh, who joined with other maverick young professors to reshape the University of Iowa into its modern academic departments. Celebrities, family, and homesick graduate students gathered at the Shambaughs’ home, a mecca for Iowa City intellectual life. Benjamin Shambaugh’s guest lecture series brought many famous visitors to the house. The couple hosted Amelia Earhart, Thornton Wilder, Hamlin Garland, Jane Addams, Walter Lippmann, the Grand Duke Alexander of Russia, and explorer Roald Amundsen, the first to reach the South Pole.
Although their social circle may suggest a distant era, the Shambaughs confronted a world that mirrors our own in significant ways. Old social structures seemed to be crumbling as a surge of technology introduced telephones, electricity, and automobiles to everyday life. Advertisements for new drugs, building contractors, and banks on the front pages of the Iowa City Daily Republican flanked gloomy reports about local murders and farm foreclosures and gossipy features on the escapades of foreign royalty. Wage riots, lynchings, and worker strikes captured the news, and the threat of worldwide depression loomed even while the world celebrated a new era of progress with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.
By comparison, Amana reflected a society in which everyone sacrificed personal gain for cooperative prosperity and spiritual growth. Bertha Shambaugh saw clearly–as many observers did not–that the Amanas had developed a communal society to free people for religious devotion rather than as a political end. In their mystical relationship to God, however, the Community of True Inspiration of Amana had carved out a bit of heaven on earth. Shambaugh’s interest in scientific documentation and her social ideals led her to photograph the colonies.
Shambaugh was the first “outsider” and one of the earliest photographers who documented the Amanas. It was a time, according to Shambaugh, “when there was still an effort to maintain Amana’s circle of seclusion.” Community elders ordinarily upheld the inspired testimony that had placed photography among the worldly vanities to be shunned. Because other communal societies also discouraged photography, hers is a rare documentary of nineteenth-century religious utopias. Equally important, she opened the door for photography in the Amanas by both amateurs within the colonies and professionals from nearby towns. Within a few years of her project, several residents took up cameras and preserved an “insider” view of their communities. Like Shambaugh, they chose complicated, but optically peerless, view cameras loaded with glass plates instead of the new amateur box cameras loaded with film.
Though they came from a seemingly homogeneous society, the Amana photographers took pictures of remarkable diversity. F. William Miller wrapped images in the charmed circle of family life yet went out to cover disasters with the instincts of a photojournalist. Christian Herrmann documented human frailty, hardship, and endurance with poetic compassion. William F. Noe brought an encyclopedic documentary approach to the entire Amana experience. Rudolph Kellenberger found powerful graphic images in everyday farm scenes. Paul Kellenberger photographed the rapidly changing social forms after the 1932 Change that brought Boy Scout troops, Maifests (May Day celebrations that predated the Octoberfests), and even sunbathing on the Iowa River. But he also returned to the interiors of old Amana churches and buildings, where he captured visually ethereal links to the past.
William Foerstner, ever the businessman, took classic shots that could have been advertisements–the bicycle is shown eclipsing the horse and buggy and the Brunswick sales trucks bringing tires for the burgeoning automobile age. Fun-loving Friedrich Oehl photographed the itinerant workers of the towns, lighthearted entertainments, and posed his family in “you are there” disaster scenes such as the aftermath of a flood. Peter Stuck carefully positioned flowers for sculptural, elegant botanical studies. Jacob Selzer choreographed and photographed hilarious tableaux even though he was gravely ill. After his death, his wife, Henrietta Selzer, made pastoral portraits of their children in every idyllic Amana setting she could find.
These photographers captured the Amanas as their isolation and religious fervor were dwindling. When the colonies adopted a market economy in 1932, however, they were among the longest lasting and most successful of more than one hundred utopias that operated on the basis of religious communalism across nineteenth-century America. Luckily, the work of so many photographers in so small a community insured preservation of a vanishing way of life in unprecedented detail.
I have a personal bond to these photographers. When I was ten years old, I taught myself to knit and thought how surprised my grandmother would be. But the only time I knitted in her presence was late that summer at her funeral. The needles and yarn and comments of the neighbors about my work were comforting as I sat in her rocking chair in her living room in South Amana, Iowa, while mourners filed past the coffin across the hall. Many years of visits after the funeral, I returned as a college student to research a lengthy paper on the Amana Colonies, and I discovered Bertha Horack Shambaugh and her Amana histories for the first time. I took several rolls of pictures for my project and only later realized that Shambaugh had extensively photographed the Amanas, creating a rare documentary of a nineteenth-century utopian religious society and an icon image of a grandmotherly woman and child in her portrait “The Knitting Lesson.”
But her pioneering social documentary photography is little known outside Iowa. In most cases, her work and the work of other photographers inside the Amanas have been published as historic illustrations without a byline. This book is an attempt to bring these photographers onstage with their photographs and to celebrate the extraordinary number and quality of pictures taken in a community in which photography was officially prohibited.
Bertha Shambaugh cherished the Amanas and won trust easily there. Who could have refused to allow the idealistic young woman to take a few pictures? Who could have guessed she would open the door to others who would take hundreds more and preserve seven generations of heritage just as it careened on a collision course with the twentieth century? You can hold up a glass plate negative to the light and peer through the still, silvery image like a magic window to the past.
I started going through glass plate negatives at the Museum of Amana History, where all or part of the archives of several photographers are gathered. Many pictures were not identified by photographer, however, and most negatives were still in family hands, often in homes where the original photographers had lived. Their sons and daughters, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren brought the works out from the desk drawers, closet shelves, and attics. The negatives often were stacked in boxes in which the original unexposed glass plates had been sold. They carried the product names of Seed, Hammer, or Kodak “dry plates” that came from stores in Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Chicago, and from mail-order catalogues.
Pharmacist F. William Miller’s negatives remained in their original sleeves, on which he had recorded f-stops, exposure times, exact dates, and details of every image. Dr. Christian Herrmann had kept a logbook that recorded similar information about his images. The families had kept old photo manuals, developer recipes, and equipment catalogues. They shared diaries, letters, and memories. A private collection included several of Shambaugh’s original glass plates, including “The Knitting Lesson,” a negative the size of a small windowpane that was like finding an x-ray of the soul of a community.
Inevitably, in a community in which just about everyone is related in some way over the generations, I discovered that one important photographer of the past was my great-uncle, William Foerstner, of High Amana. His daughter, Emilie Foerstner Jeck, still lives at the family home, and she took me to her attic, where we looked at hundreds of his negatives stored in Amana baskets. His camera, developing gear, and kerosene lantern for lantern slides were on the shelves above. Amana and several towns around it came to life in this time machine of early twentieth-century photography.
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The seven villages of the Amana Colonies in Iowa attract thousands of tourists each year to their restaurants, shops and historic sites. The colonies trace their roots to the Community of True Inspiration, a religious society founded in Germany that believed, like the Quakers, in direct inspiration from God. After more than a century of persecution, the Inspirationists fled Germany in the 1840s. They settled first near Buffalo, then established the Amana Colonies. Amana families lived in individual homes but ate and worked communally and held all their property and businesses in common ownership. The colonies joined mainstream American society in 1932 when residents voted to separate church and state and establish a modern market economy. The Amana Church remains active today, nearly 300 years after it was founded.
