In My Kingdom, Catalan photographer Txema Salvans sets the ordinary rituals of Spain’s Mediterranean coast against the language of political authority. Published by MACK in 2018, the book brings together black-and-white photographs of beach-goers and residents of coastal developments with citations from the speeches of Juan Carlos I, King of Spain from 1975 to 2015. The contrast is immediate but never merely decorative: royal rhetoric, presented in the voice of a benevolent sovereign, becomes a filter through which gestures of leisure, fatigue, desire, aggression, and self-display acquire a political charge.

Salvans’s subject is power as it appears in everyday life—not only in institutions, but in bodies, habits, spaces, and small claims to personal sovereignty. On the beach, people nap, eat, sunbathe, play, love, and suffer; their apparently private freedoms sit beside the grand language of the state. The book’s wit lies in this friction between image and text. The photographs observe ordinary citizens without turning them into symbols of a single social type, while the accompanying quotations lend their actions an uneasy, sometimes comic resonance.

A stapled booklet extends the project through extracts from fervent speeches by figures including Margaret Thatcher, Benito Mussolini, Winston Churchill, and Chaplin’s Dictator, broadening the inquiry beyond Spain to the rhetoric of authoritarian power. My Kingdom therefore operates as both a photographic sequence and a carefully constructed political reading apparatus. Its significance for collectors lies in the precision of that collaboration between documentary observation, historical quotation, and editorial design, and in the way a familiar leisure landscape becomes a study of how authority is spoken, performed, and absorbed. The 176-page paperback is published by MACK.