Photobook Reviews, Episode 18 – by Kate Schultze
After a captivating exploration of UFO sightings in Northern Finland in Some Kind of Heavenly Fire Maria Lax is back with her new book Stray Sod published by Setanta Books. This time, it’s Ireland and not Finland, and instead of strange sightings Lax explores forces that can’t be seen.
Publisher
Setanta Books
Layout
Coptic Bound (Exposed Spine) Hardback, Cloth; 300 x 240 mm; 120 pages; 63 images
Price
€60,95
Link
In Irish folklore, “stray sod” refers to patches of land enchanted by fairies — ground that, when unknowingly stepped upon, causes the traveller to become suddenly, inexplicably lost. Familiar paths vanish. Landmarks dissolve. A person might wander for hours in a place they have known all their life. The disorientation is not merely physical. To step on stray sod is to be pulled out of the world you know and into something running just beneath it.
West Cork offers its own version of this feeling. Fog appears out of nowhere and settles for days. A heavy storm rises and the horizon disappears. It was here that Lax says she truly understood, for the first time, what it felt like to get lost — in all meanings of that word.
Maria Lax has spent time wandering that countryside, and the darkness runs through her work. Weird colours conjured with custom flash, strange circumstances producing surprising results by chance — there is something in her images that suggests unseen forces guiding the camera. The logic of magical realism, where the extraordinary is not announced but simply present, growing from the ordinary like something always there beneath the surface.
In an interview with the Guardian, Lax spoke about folklore as a form of history. Where written history tends toward the grand sweep of power and politics, folklore zooms in on the everyman — holding what official records leave out: the fear, the wonder, the daily negotiation with a world that does not always behave. As oral traditions are replaced by social content and memory moves online, the question becomes urgent: what stories do we tell, and what will we leave behind? Rather than using existing archive imagery, Lax chose to treat her own photographs as the archive — pulling them apart through analogue distortion, glitching, some pushed completely beyond recognition.
The book itself reflects this tension between the familiar and the strange. Classic in its construction, it feels grounded — until it doesn’t. Translucent pink pages appear throughout, carrying brief texts that illuminate the folklore behind the images, gently orienting the reader in a world that keeps slipping. Towards the endon different yellow paper, a text by Jonny Dillon of the National Folklore Collection in Ireland anchors the work in its deeper history. Then, at the very close, photographs of the archive as a place surface — records of the very forces the book has been circling. After moving through Lax’s fractured, enchanted images, the reader is presented with evidence. Proof, almost, that those invisible experiences people have always described were real enough to be written down and kept.
In folklore, there is a remedy for those lost to fairy enchantment: turn your clothing inside out, and the spell will break. In Lax’s work there is a quiet reminder that this is always available to us. No matter where you feel disillusioned or estranged — sometimes all it takes is to stop, and turn your coat around, maybe we should all try it some time.
If Stray Sod inspired you, make sure to take a look at Maria’s first book, Some Kind of Heavenly Fire. And if you’re into magical realism and the countryside setting I highly recommend having a loot at Thomas Roussets Praberians.
