Published by Kehrer Verlag in 2015, Martin Usborne’s Where Hunting Dogs Rest examines the fate of hunting dogs in Spain after the hare-coursing season. The project takes as its background an estimate that as many as 100,000 dogs are abandoned each year. Usborne photographs animals that have been rescued, returning them pictorially to the kinds of places where dogs are commonly left: roadsides, ravines and empty car parks.

The photographs do not record abandonment as an unfolding event. Instead, they bring its consequences into view through the dogs’ bodies and their uneasy relation to the surrounding landscape. Each animal is granted the concentration of a formal portrait, while the locations retain their associations with neglect. The resulting tension—between composure and exposure, dignity and mistreatment—gives the work its ethical weight without requiring scenes of overt violence.

Usborne’s approach also invokes the atmosphere of paintings by Diego Velázquez, made during a period when such dogs occupied a more respected cultural position. This art-historical reference is not merely decorative. It establishes a visual standard of gravity and regard against which the animals’ contemporary treatment can be measured. Classical poise and present-day precarity remain visible at once, complicating any simple reading of the dogs as either picturesque subjects or anonymous victims.

Across 108 pages, the hardcover volume sustains a narrowly defined encounter between animal portraiture, landscape and documentary purpose. For collectors concerned with the ways photography can join advocacy to a consciously historical visual language, Where Hunting Dogs Rest merits close attention. Its distinction lies in that conjunction: rescued dogs are rendered as individual presences, while the places around them preserve the social conditions from which they were saved.