I first came across Kathleen McLaughlin’s pictures of Maramureş when she joined our Your Shot photo community in June. Every morning I look through the thousands of pictures submitted by our Your Shot members in search of the most compelling images to highlight on our website.

The nostalgic and timeless quality of McLaughlin’s images initially caught my eye. Her intimate, black-and-white portraits and landscapes showed hardworking families from another land and another time, tending to giant hay bales in traditional dress.

Around the same time as McLaughlin began submitting pictures to Your Shot, National Geographic magazine published a story photographed by Rena Effendi documenting life in some of the same remote Romanian villages as McLaughlin had photographed. The similarities between