Maria Lax left a Finnish hometown and returned to find it gone, present only in memory. That recognition drives Taken by the Tide, the publisher’s first book with Lax, a Finnish artist based in London whose photography and film circle questions of identity, belief and modern folklore. The book belongs to Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series and takes as its subject the distance between a place as it was lived and a place as it can now only be recalled.

The images set the familiar adrift. Everyday surroundings acquire an alien cast, while the rising tide works as both image and pressure, pulling the viewer away from shore toward what the publisher describes as an open sea of loneliness. Home is not fixed here; it is a condition of drift. That tension between remembered and actual place gives the project its specific charge within the series, and it does so without resorting to documentary description.

The edition carries an original signed photograph alongside the bound book, pairing a single image with the larger photographic project and giving the object a dual character. The compact hardcover format suits the intimacy of the subject, keeping the images formally exact while holding them close to the hand. Lax’s themes, identity and belief filtered through photographic and filmic means, are concentrated here rather than expanded.

For collectors drawn to photographic treatments of memory, displacement and northern landscape, the book’s significance lies in the conjunction the publisher identifies: a world where the familiar appears alien, organized by the tide. It is a focused project by an artist whose work is exhibited internationally, and its interest rests on that precise alignment of subject, image and object.