Stray Sod takes its title from an Irish folk belief: a patch of ground that, stepped on after dark, leaves a walker unable to find the way home until morning. Maria Lax builds the book from first-hand accounts held in the Irish National Archives, then returns to rural Irish landscapes to photograph them as sites where orientation fails. Her subject is not the fairy fort as spectacle but the experience of sudden disorientation — the moment familiar ground stops agreeing with the body moving across it.
The archival testimonies describe ordinary people overtaken by strangeness: reference points distort, distances mislead, a known road becomes unrecognizable. Lax treats these narratives as more than curiosities. The accounts cluster around periods of upheaval — bereavement, illness, displacement — and the book reads them alongside contemporary forms of instability, from addiction and depression to shifting political ground and accelerating technological change. What results is a body of work about being lost in a landscape that has quietly ceased to be legible.
Setanta Books issues the first edition in 2026 as a Coptic-bound hardback with an exposed spine and cloth cover, 300 by 240 mm, running 120 pages with 63 images. The format matters: an open spine makes the book’s structure visible and allows pages to lie flat, so the sequence can be read as a continuous progression rather than a series of separate plates. Lax is a Finnish photographer and director based in London; this is her third book, and the work extends her interest in places where folklore, memory and the contemporary rural collide.
For collectors, the significance lies in that combination: a clearly defined conceptual subject, an archival foundation, and a binding whose physical logic serves the sequencing. The book should interest those following contemporary photography’s use of folklore and landscape, and those attentive to how a photobook’s construction shapes meaning. It is a first edition from an independent publisher that treats the object as part of the argument.
