Clare Richardson’s Beyond the Forest borrows its title from the Hungarian meaning of Transylvania—’beyond the forest’—and its setting from a small farming community on a high plateau in that historical region. The place is said to be home to descendants of the children led out of Hamlyn, a legend that gives the landscape an unusual charge. Richardson’s camera attends to a community governed by hard work and patience, where weather and crop cycles set the tempo of daily life.

The photographs move through this world without forcing it into allegory. The terrain resembles both the fairy-tale scenes of Hamlyn and a pre-industrial, pre-enclosure England—a comparison that suggests how deeply the book is concerned with layered time. Richardson’s approach is patient and observational, allowing the rhythms of agricultural life to shape the sequence.

Beyond the Forest follows Richardson’s first publication, Harlemville, and belongs with her related Romanian series, Sylvan, which has been shown in London and Canada. Published by SteidlMACK in 2007, the book carries both her photographs and her text, making it a self-contained statement rather than an illustrated catalogue.

For a collector, the book’s interest lies in its sustained inquiry: a body of work that treats a specific community and its landscape as a way of thinking about history, myth, and the persistence of older ways of living. It is a quiet but distinctive entry in the photobook record of the 2000s, and one that rewards attention to its pacing and its refusal of easy nostalgia.