More than 100 years ago, Bertha Shambaugh set out to photograph the Amana Colonies, the utopian religious community twenty miles northwest of Iowa City. Shambaugh brought to her project a cleat social mission to tell the world mired in the upheavals of the 1890s about a kinder way of life. She easily won the trust of the community and began publishing photographs and articles about the society she so admired. Soon after, several Amana members ignored their community's prohibition on photography and took up cameras to record the people and events around them.Picturing Utopia: Bertha Shambaugh and the Amana Photographers celebrates their artistic vision and offers a rare glimpse into a nineteenth-century religious utopia. Abigail Foerstner brings together this stunning collection of photographs along with the stories of the photographers who took them. Together the pictures and text fill in an untold chapter of American photographic history and provide an insider's view of life in Amana.
The photographs, preserved on glass plate negatives, provide an unbroken photographic record beginning with Shambaugh's work in the 1890s and continuing through the Colonies' transition to mainstream American life with the Great Change in 1932.
