On a wooded stretch of road in the Ozarks, people have long reported a ball of light that appears to no one in particular and vanishes when approached. Devil’s Promenade takes its title from that road and from the legend that keeps drawing people back to it. Antone Dolezal and Lara Shipley both grew up in the region, and the book is what they made on returning.

Their approach is neither a documentary survey nor a folklore anthology. Restrained contemporary portraits of Ozark residents sit alongside archival photographs, printed matter and images made in response to older tales. Spiritual gatherings, the land itself, and the boredom and darkness of rural life appear in turn, so that belief and everyday routine are not treated as separate subjects. Roughly a century of local history runs through the sequence without being reduced to chronology.

Overlapse published the book in 2021 as a first edition: hardcover, 152 pages, about 18 by 24 centimetres, section-sewn with a cloth-covered spine. Layouts alternate between full-bleed images and quiet white space, which lets the photographs read as a continuous narrative rather than a run of plates.

For a collector, several things are worth noting. This is a collaboration between two photographers with the same origins and an evident stake in how those origins are described, and it is a first edition that is now out of print. Its methods — archive, testimony, landscape, staged image — place it within a line of American photobooks about place and myth, while resisting the nostalgia that so often accompanies that line.