"How could I not love these people?"

Photographer Bill Coleman cherishes gift of friendship

by Robin Crawford

It’s warm for autumn, and in the shady yard outside a one-room schoolhouse, a small group of Amish children are enjoying a break from their studies. Bill Coleman pulls his car up alongside the weathered fence surrounding the schoolyard, and seven or eight children, laughing and smiling, come running.

CDT/Nabil K. Mark

Bill Coleman photographs in an Amish barn. Bill Coleman has been photographing the Amish for over 30 years. CDT/Nabil K. Mark

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They climb on the fence, jockeying for position, calling out: “Hi Bill! What are you doing here?”

“Are you going to take my picture?”

Maybe later, Bill says, once they are home. He introduces them to his passenger.

“This is Titus. That’s Samuel. There’s Hannah, and Eli.” He pauses a moment, pretending to forget, then continues. “Over there, that’s monkey nose, and next to him is freckle face.” It’s a silly joke, but one that sends the children into peals of laughter. They chatter happily, then are gone, back inside to await the day’s final bell.

An Amish woman in a wagon pulls up next to the Bill’s window and stops. She stares at him. Her face is stony, her eyes, angry. “Who are you?” she demands.

He seems unperturbed. “I’m an Englishman,” he says simply.

A quick chuck of the reins and the wagon lurches forward, turning on the rutted dirt path that leads into the schoolyard. She drives past the other waiting wagons and steers until she blocks Bill’s view of the schoolyard. She leans over a time or two, glaring at him. “Do you want me to report you?” she shouts.

Bill is unruffled. “My license plate is on the back of my car,” he says pleasantly. “I can write it down for you, if you’d like.”

“She doesn’t know me,” he says later, recalling the 2006 shootings at an Amish school in Nickel Mines. “A lot of Amish are still very scared after what happened in Lancaster. They get upset if they see someone hanging around a schoolhouse. Who can blame them?”

For a small group of Amish families in a bucolic area of central Pennsylvania, however, Coleman and his camera are as much a part of life as the plows and quilts he often photographs. They’ve come to consider Bill a friend, and for 35 years have granted him access to a world closed to most outsiders.

The resulting photos, graceful, intimate and often humorous, have earned him a reputation as the world’s foremost photographer of Amish culture and earned him a place in Nikon’s Legends of the Lens series, a photographic hall of fame.

The Nebraska Amish that Coleman photographs, or “white-toppers,” as they’re known for their white buggy tops, are the most conservative of all Amish sects, eschewing items such as curtains or screens, floor coverings, zippers, buttons or snaps. Intensely private and distrustful of outsiders, they don’t use electricity or indoor plumbing, and they generally don’t allow themselves to be photographed.

Much of what the world has seen of the Amish — children walking hand in hand down a snowy country lane, skeletal barn beams silhouetted against a bright blue sky, girls pulling a sled through the snow — has come from images collected in Bill’s books, “Amish Odyssey,” “The Gift to Be Simple” and “The Gift of Friendship.” His photos are featured in magazines and galleries around the world.

Bill is a soft-spoken man with a religious-like zeal to his work. “I am enamored completely by this lifestyle,” he said. “I feel a kind of calling to be there, even though it borders on unrequited love. I can’t help getting into my car and making that trip.”

He sees his photos as a way of preserving a culture that has changed relatively little in the past 100 years.

“Ten years ago, it dawned on me that my photos have to have more function than décor on a wall,” he said. “They should serve as an object lesson to we, the English, of the beauty we are oblivious of.”

FOCUSING ON THE AMISH

Coleman was a successful portrait photographer with a booming business in State College when an old friend came by one day to take him on a helicopter ride. Flying over an Amish-populated area, he was entranced by the one-room schoolhouses and patchwork fields plowed by teams of heavy horses.

“I couldn’t believe it when he put the helicopter down,” he said. “I thought, what kind of world is this?”

He returned to the area time and time again, carrying a sketch pad and pencil. The sketches became a gateway to a new life. “They would come up to me when I was sketching and we would converse,” he said. “It gave the Amish a chance to observe me, learn about me.”

It would be years before he brought his camera on visits, and longer still before he began using it. One snowy day, everything changed. “It was the winter magic, it just called to me,” he said. “There were scenes that had to be photographed, screamed to be photographed; there was no choice. I knew my days of regular studio portraiture were numbered.”

He began to carry his camera everywhere. The families that knew him at first tolerated it, then, when they saw the way his photos captured their lives, began to relax and accept what he was doing.

He heads out with his camera, on average, three days a week, depending on weather and light. Snowy days are still his favorite. “The magnificence, it covers all of man’s sins — even the Amish,” he said.

Fiercely independent, the octogenarian, who has had two hip replacements and wears two hearing aids, lives alone above his studio in State College. Until fairly recently, he kept a tent in his truck for emergencies. “I’d pitch a tent in the snow if it got too heavy,” he said. “Once you’re in the infantry, you’ll sleep anywhere.”

“It makes me nuts,” his son Noah, who lives in Los Angeles, said of his father roaming rural roads alone. “He still views himself as a 45-year-old man.” Bill finds peace under the open skies, among the winding roads and quiet rhythms of country life. “It’s like shedding a layer of plastic on my body every time I go out,” he said.

Driving slowly along a deserted road, he points to a tree. “Look at the fabulous texture right there,” he says, gazing intently as he passes. “Just beautiful.”

The best pictures, he said, are a matter of being in the right place at the right time and being a good observer. “There’s a whopping difference between looking and seeing,” he says.

Although it’s clear he’s considered a friend, there’s a mutual understanding that he can never be completely accepted by his subjects. “To really be a photographer in the true sense, you’ve got to be a predator,” he said. “A camera is a weapon. It steals images and souls, and you sometimes have to put your sensitivities away for a while.”

NO 'SPECIAL GIFT'

Bill, a Penn State graduate, was living in Pottsville when he joined the war effort. World War II was raging across Europe and a patriotic fever was gripping the country. He was enlisted in the Army Specialized Training Program, scheduled to study language at Cornell University after basic training.

Then came D-Day, and everything changed.

Instead of elite intelligence jobs, he and his unit were off to the front lines. “Two days after the invasion, they threw us into the infantry,” he said. “We were boarding trains to Cornell, and the trains never started.”

It was fall, and the Pennsylvania countryside was in full, blazing glory. During the long months that followed, it was the memory of those colors, and a special girl, that helped him survive, he said.

“I kept thinking about how I wanted to come back to that color and her.”

They fought in Belgium, France and Germany, where he was taken captive and held as a prisoner of war for eight months. He remembers begging German surgeons not to amputate his frostbitten toes. They didn’t, but the damage was extensive, and he lost sensation in both feet. Walking became a matter of maintaining balance by thorough visual checks and avoiding uneven surfaces.

Back home, he found himself fascinated by the stylized black-and-white European films of the times. He was entranced by the works of photographic greats Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Henri Cartier Bresson, whose photos seem to capture not just the image, but the essence of their subjects.

“They have such spontaneity, originality,” he said. “There is a level of photo I’d love to attain.”

His eye is exacting and merciless. He discards, he estimates, 95 percent of his work. “A big wastebasket is no small part of getting down to the essence of a photo,” he said.

Despite the constant stream of orders and requests for his work from around the globe, Bill is relentlessly self-critical. “I never did and still don’t think I have a special gift,” he says. “The fact that someone buys my work is like having someone applaud my breathing.”

GIVING BACK

It’s hot for autumn, both outside and inside the house where Bill is visiting. Just inside a doorway separating the kitchen from the house, a young woman sits on a chair, cradling her sister’s tiny body.

The girl is 6, unable to speak or use her limbs. There’s an IV stand next to the chair. Long tubes disappear under the layers of her dress. Still, her brown eyes are bright as she looks at her visitors, and she smiles at the sight of Bill.

“Hello again. It’s good to see you. You’re not getting into trouble, are you?” he gently teases. He tickles her chin, and her smile gets even bigger. “You’re a ticklish one, aren’t you?’ he asks.

Genetic disorders run rampant in the Amish community, and Bill has seen firsthand the toll it takes on families. Dwarfism, brain damage, paralysis and a host of other metabolic and physical defects are not uncommon. Many afflicted children die at an early age, while some live in a vegetative state well into their late teens or early 20s.

All children, no matter how severely disabled, are cared for at home by family. In a culture in which children are relied on to help with chores as soon as they can walk, it’s a terrible burden for struggling families and one that haunts Bill.

“I think about them all the time,” he said. “But when I see the way sick and incapacitated children are taken care of instead of institutionalized, as we would do, I think, how could I not love these people?”

He says he hasn’t taken a salary in years, but helps as he can. Some families receive regular checks for profits from photos that sell well. He’s provided financial support for a family in a bad way until relatives could help out, and he helps underwrite expenses for the community’s annual auction.

“I try to help out, especially if I know a family is in need,” he said. “I just wish I could give back to them all they’ve given me.”

“His affection for these people is unbelievable,” Noah said. “He transforms when he’s there. The kids, he just absolutely loves them. It’s always funny to me that he’s so demonstrably affectionate with them when generally, as a people, they’re not.”

RESPECTING LIMITS

Standing on her wooden porch, an Amish woman watches Bill trying to coax a smile from her youngest son. A flaxen-haired 3-year-old in a wide-brimmed hat, the boy is none too sure about Bill. But his face is cherubic and Bill is determined.

The woman, now 33, was one of Bill’s earliest subjects. Now her children are the focus. Having someone documenting her life was “different,” she said.

“There are times when you really have to get chores done, and it can make it harder,” she said. “Some people don’t like it too much, I think,” she said of the reaction from others in the community, as the boy finally dissolves into giggles. “I don’t think there’s really anything against it.”

That is a gift Bill takes seriously. “The Amish have taught me an awful lot without trying,” he said. “I find their basic honesty — what you get is what you see — so refreshing.”

He recognizes, and respects, the limitations of the relationships forged there. “There are things I don’t ever talk about with Amish.” he said. “I never come out on a Sunday, or if I do, I keep my camera down.”

For the families, unannounced visits from the talkative Englishman with the camera are a part of life. Sometimes he spends hours with the children, following them as they do chores or play. Sometimes he just comes to visit.

“He’ll come by to sit on the porch, and we all just talk and talk,” one Amish woman said, watching Bill turn a child this way and that, looking for just the right light to capture the texture of freshly cut hair. “He brings a big bucket of ice cream. The kids love that.”

Back inside the house, Bill is playful as he talks with the father of the family. Even after all this time, he’s telling the man, there are still things he’d like to know but won’t ask. “Sometimes I try to get information by joking,” he said. “In all the photos of laundry lines, you never see underwear. Why not? Where is it?”

The answer, like all things Amish, is both simple and practical.

“That’s because we know you’re always hanging around with your camera,” the man replied with a grin. “We hang it in the kitchen.”