Metsästä takes its title from the Finnish for “from the woods,” and the phrase sets the book’s direction: not a survey of landscape, but an account of what happens to people who spend their time among trees. Anne Golaz, a Swiss photographer with Finnish roots, made the series in Finland over roughly two years; Kehrer Verlag issued it in hardcover in 2012, in an English-language edition of 120 pages.

Hunting is the material. Golaz photographs the men who chase trophies they rarely see, the rituals that give the hunt its shape, and the women who appear among them as figures out of another century. Animals, killing and the forest’s own lexicon run through the sequence. The point is less ethnographic than psychological: what a culture does with the woods, and what the woods do back.

Her method keeps the book from settling into reportage. Light is used as an instrument of staging, the images are built as openings rather than as records of an event, and the sequence deliberately presses at the edges of photographic genre. It arrives after two earlier bodies of work — Scènes rurales, shown in Switzerland and France from 2008, and the hunting cycle Les Chasses, published in 2010 — and reads as a continuation rather than a debut.

The series was first shown at the Pictures Festival in Vevey, Switzerland, and was shortlisted in 2012 for the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards, alongside books by Stéphanie Solinas and others. Contributions from Anna-Kaisa Rastenberger and Nathalie Herschdorfer accompany the photographs and give the Finnish context a written frame.

For a collector, the argument for the book is not scarcity but construction. Golaz treats the photobook as an edited object: the sequencing withholds before it reveals, the tonal range is deliberate, and the Finnish subject is handled without either exoticism or apology. It belongs with the more considered European photobooks of its year.