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The Atlantic
The Atlantic
13 Feb 2023
Sarah Yager


NextImg:Big-Sky Country

In 2005, the photographer Christopher Churchill visited a Hutterite colony on the Montana Hi-Line, a sparsely populated stretch of prairie along the Canadian border. He was traveling the United States for a project about faith, hoping to find commonalities among divergent beliefs. But as he spent time in the small religious community, surrounded by endless wheat fields and tracks that once formed the main line of the Great Northern Railway, he soon became interested in another American belief system: capitalism. Churchill was struck by the way commerce had shaped even this isolated landscape—and also by how the colony, in which members live and work together and share the proceeds of their labor, offered an alternative view of prosperity.

Color photo of white church with steeple, with power lines along the left side and storage silos on the right
2 photos: woman in shorts flanked by 2 shirtless men in front of boxing ring; boy holding skateboard in field with mountains in distant background
Black-and-white photo of boy riding bike in front of building
Top: A church in Inverness, population 77, flanked by power lines and grain bins. Middle left: Near railroad tracks in Butte, Montana, Churchill stumbled across a bare-knuckle boxing match. Middle right: A boy holds a longboard in Ennis, a town established during the Montana gold rush that is now a gateway for tourists visiting Yellowstone National Park. Bottom: A Hutterite boy in Gildford.

The experience got Churchill thinking about how individual lives intersect with broader economic forces. It became the inspiration for a new project, focused on “the American dream,” that brought him back to Montana last summer. The resulting photographs, some shot in black-and-white and some in color, contain traces of American industry, class divides, and westward expansion: power lines interrupting the horizon, the glint of a belt buckle, the wind blowing through a reservation town. But the people Churchill met in brief encounters on his drive across the state take the foreground.

TK
TK
Top left: A woman sits on her front porch in Anaconda, just down the street from the grand town library—a gift from Phoebe Hearst, whose husband invested in the copper industry, which brought entrepreneurs rushing to the state until the mines went bust. Top right: Two brothers lean against a pickup at the Last Chance Stampede and Fair in Helena, before going to the 4-H livestock sale there. Bottom left: A young father holds his baby on the Blackfeet Reservation. Bottom right: A Hutterite woman in Gildford.

There is something precarious in these images, yet also defiant. A toughness and a tenderness. Churchill’s subjects look directly into the camera, their expression demanding interpretation. This elusiveness offers its own revelation: A dream, after all, is a matter of one’s own perception. Hutterite children bounce on a trampoline, their long skirts floating against the open sky. The girl in the center seems to smile, suspended in mid-air. It is impossible to know whether she is going up or down.

Color photo of vast open orange-yellow field dotted with bales of hay, with low mountains in hazy distance
Hay bales near Great Falls, Montana

This article appears in the March 2023 print edition with the headline “Views of Montana.”