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Although his colony assigned him to build firetrucks, Mr. Hoffer developed an uncommon calling for a Hutterite. He fell in love with photography. Braving the censure of the elders, he snapped hundreds of photos of his community, his family, their clothes, their closed, agrarian way of life and the prairie light. Sometimes people complained, but as time passed, they got used to him, even when he began uploading the images to photo-sharing site Flickr, and to his personal website.

He was even starting to earn a reputation. His work was displayed at an art exhibition at a Mennonite church gallery in Winnipeg this year. But Mr. Hofer carved out a small slice of fame when his work was featured in the Western Producer last week, a newspaper known to every farm home west of Manitoba.

“Slowly, slowly they’ve grown used to it. Some are still totally against it and stuff, like the minister and stuff. But they gradually got used to it and used to me sharing it around,” he said. “It used to be that whenever I posted a photo of even one face, I had to go ask them and they maybe gave permision and if they didn’t, and it was too good a photo not to post, I’d get some crap from them for posting it and I got that on a daily basis.”

For their part, the Hutterites in his community of Green Acres seem less comfortable with Mr. Hofer’s hobby than the young man let on. Between his work and a recent television show, this traditional, patriarchal community of about 50,000 across North America, mostly on the Prairies, has been left increasingly exposed to a modern world creeping its way in through near-universal Internet access and the cell phones that are now as ubiquitous among young Hutterites as in mainstream society.