Casa de Campo, published by MACK in 2013, takes its title from Madrid’s largest public park: an urban woodland said to extend across an area five times the size of New York’s Central Park. Between 2008 and 2012, Antonio M. Xoubanova returned repeatedly to its paths, attending to the people, animals, and objects encountered there. The park is not treated as neutral scenery. It becomes a bounded field of observation, where ordinary traces—evidence that someone was present, that something happened—acquire an unsettled narrative force.

Xoubanova describes the resulting work as a photographic fable rooted in reality, yet the book’s method is less documentary inventory than imaginative reconstruction. Gathered within the same terrain, human figures, animals, and animate and inanimate things begin to appear as related signs. The familiar is made strange without being detached from the physical world of Madrid. Luis Lopez’s accompanying text extends this logic through the perspectives of the researcher, archaeologist, intruder, and anthropologist, each of whom encounters the same persistent fact: somebody was here.

Designed in five chapters—love, death, fleeting moments, symbols, and a lack of direction—the book gives its observations a deliberately archaic, fairy-tale structure. This sequence allows images to accumulate through association rather than straightforward explanation, joining the symbolic to the oneiric while preserving the park’s material specificity. The result is a work about reading places through their remnants, and about how photography can turn the evidence of everyday life into an open-ended fiction.

For collectors, Casa de Campo deserves attention as Xoubanova’s first book and as a clearly articulated collaboration between his photographic project and Lopez’s text. It also locates an important contemporary photographic question—how reality becomes narrative—in a singular Madrid landscape. The book’s distinctive achievement lies in holding those two registers together: close observation and invented myth, the public park as lived environment and as a stage for ambiguous signs.