Beyond Maps and Atlases begins with a loss. Bertien van Manen travelled to Ireland without knowing quite what she was looking for; her husband had died, and the people who had anchored her earlier photographs gave way to weather, distance and the quiet of the edges. Published by MACK in 2016, the book is less a report on a place than a record of standing inside one: a country seen at the moment it stops being a country and becomes myth and legend.

That move reads clearly against her career. Born in The Hague in 1942, van Manen came to photography almost by accident, photographing her children with an old camera. Fashion work followed; she left it behind in 1977 after discovering the documentary photography of Robert Frank and Josef Koudelka, and built a practice around closeness instead of distance — an intimate, organic relationship between photographer and subject. Easter and Oak Trees and Moonshine extend that line of inquiry. Beyond Maps and Atlases takes it somewhere colder.

The title’s refusal is deliberate. Seamus Heaney’s lines about an elsewhere world, beyond maps and atlases, where all is woven into itself, point toward a search for meaning in terrain that facts cannot fully hold. Van Manen follows a feeling rather than a route, into a place of mystery and vastness.

For a collection, the book’s claim rests on two things: its position within a long documentary practice, and the care of its construction — a debossed hardback with a tipped-in image, where mood accumulates across the sequence rather than being asserted in any single frame. Read alongside Easter and Oak Trees and Moonshine, it shows a photographer working with atmosphere, memory and place in ways that reward slow attention.