Gertrud, the 2024 photobook by Maja Daniels published by Void, takes as its point of departure a single accusation: in 1667, a twelve-year-old girl named Gertrud Svensdotter was said to have walked on water in Älvdalen, Sweden. That claim helped set in motion the Swedish witch trials, a period of mass hysteria that, over eight years, claimed more than 300 lives. Daniels, who grew up hearing her grandmother speak of Gertrud, does not attempt a documentary reconstruction. Instead, she treats photography as a tool for mythmaking. Most of the pictures were made through interventions in the forest, using landscape, a cast of characters, and objects that carry a talismanic weight. The result is a body of images that resists linear time and fixed place, asking how a visual narrative might remake our relationship to the past.
The book interleaves Daniels’s photographs with archival images by Tenn Lars Persson (1878–1938), whose work she also drew on in her previous book, Elf Dalia. The two sets of pictures do not sit easily together; their friction is part of the point. By unsettling the boundary between document and invention, Gertrud opens a contemporary dialogue with a historical figure who has too often been reduced to a footnote in a story of persecution. Daniels has described the project as a way of challenging historical constructs and of reviving a culture in which strong, independent women and their knowledge were suppressed. The forest, re-enchanted, becomes a site of resistance and of the unspoken.
The 168-page book is a cloth quarterbound hardcover with a foiled cover, designed by João Linneu, with the concept credited to Linneu and Myrto Steirou. It includes texts by Kollektivet Mismar and is published in English. The sequencing of photographs and archival material is central to the book’s effect: it disorients, refusing the comfort of a single authoritative voice. Gertrud was shortlisted for the Svenska Fotobokspriset 2025, and its jury praised the way Daniels draws readers into a mythic universe—unsettling, beautiful, and suggestive. For collectors, the book’s significance lies less in any claim of rarity than in its method: a serious, sustained attempt to use the photobook as a space where history, myth, and image can be renegotiated.
