Anne Golaz made Chasses in 2010 as the seventh Enquête photographique fribourgeoise, a recurring commissioned survey in the Swiss canton of Fribourg. The subject she chose was hunting: less the trophy tableau than the habits, permissions and compromises that govern how people in that territory meet the animals around them. Infolio published the work the same year as a German-language paperback of 104 pages.

The book belongs to the inquiry rather than to the monograph. Its logic is territorial and cumulative — one region, one contested activity, examined from enough angles that no single position holds the whole. The pictures are made inside the situation rather than at a critical distance from it, and the sequence reads as material gathered over an extended period. That is what the Fribourg survey format asks of its photographer, and it is rarely delivered in such concentrated form.

The volume also carries writing. Contributors listed with the book include Hubertus von Gemmingen, Raphaël Abrille, Sergio Dalla Bernardina, Laureline Duvillard and Sylvie Henguely; standard records do not itemise their individual tasks, and it would be unwise to treat the list as an exhaustive account of everyone who worked on it. What can be said is that Chasses was assembled as a composite document, photographs and text set against one another rather than one illustrating the other.

For a collector, the case for Chasses is not scarcity. It is position: an early book by a photographer whose later volumes, among them Corbeau, have travelled considerably further, made at the point where a regional commission and a personal authorial project met. The modest extent is part of its character — 104 pages, paperback, a record of a specific inquiry rather than a retrospective summary. Books tied this closely to a place and a brief often turn out to be the ones that later reveal most about how an artist’s thinking took shape.