Ruven afanador biography examples

Ruven Afanador is an internationally renowned photographer of limitless imagination, powerful vision and profound sense of self.

While in Italy, he also discovered the type of model, that was to become his prototype: interesting rather than conventionally beautiful, of sculpted neck and arms, and the graceful long torso for centuries favored by painters----enigmatic and timeless.

He returned from Italy in 1990 with an impressive portfolio, settling in New York and soon coming to the attention of editors at the major magazines.

One must go to the cinema in search of something other than the story that is being told. He weaves it all together in a thousand amplifications, like a grotesquely
sumptuous world, an unthinkable body of light and shade. Although I never took up photography professionally, it has always been very present in my work as a set director and creator of worlds.

Ruven’s work has appeared in countless publications including New York Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, The New York Times Magazine, numerous Vogue editions, Tatler, Elle, and The New Yorker. When asked about cinema, Estrella de Diego, whom I paraphrase, said: “One must enter that dark space without premeditation, with the film already having started, but without knowing beforehand what is being shown, dragged along by chance and fortune.

There is no photograph that is not suspended a sigh – or a thousand and one kisses – away from the fire that burns the image. With that passion, he would transform ordinary reality into captivating splendor. “From my first assignment I knew that photography would be my life’s passion”, says Afanador. Ruven Afanador observes flamenco through a lens that is deforming, a lens made of dreams, desire and memories.

If the elements of tradition are reassuring by definition, what happens when they become strange and unrecognisable? Lack of studio space in the Italian city, forced him to develop techniques for photographing outdoors, in alleyways and streets, on the steps of churches and palazzos, incorporating backgrounds to frame images with texture and depth, a highly conceptual approach that Afanador uses to this day.

One must sit down and abandon oneself to one’s senses without preparation, and the senses must not have been guided via opinions or synopses.

His personal projects have been exhibited in Galleries and Museums in Spain, Italy, Colombia, Argentina, Japan and the United States. My journey begins where those sessions end, and when I stop dreaming about them, unable to remember the full details or to subject them to a logic that has become lost along the way, that is when I find myself overcome by the desire to wake up.

Thus, it produces a different understanding that is subjective, infallible and revealing. Ruven Afanador’s masterful photo sessions in Andalusia are unrepeatable: it would be impossible to repeat the alchemy that formed between the photographer and figures with such charisma as Israel Galván, Matilde Coral, Eva Yerbabuena, José Antonio and the BNE’s very own Rubén Olmo.

Our work is simply another link in the long genealogical chain of dreaming and desire: it relates (or reveals) our gaze, which is that of Ruven Afanador, looking at his models.