RUVÉN AFANADOR

To talk about Ruvén Afanador is to talk about Colombia and about his role as a creative, as an artist who carries the country within his way of working. He has spent over forty years building his own visual language. In his photographs, documentation disappears: what remains is an interpretation of the body, light, and emotion. He is most likely one of the Latin American photographers who has left the deepest mark on the last four decades.

Ruvén was born in Bucaramanga, the city of parks, set on a high plateau above the Río de Oro and surrounded by majestic mountains. An enchanted world that has left a deep imprint on his work. He studied art abroad and began his career as a photographer in Milan. He ended up in New York, where he built an international career with publications like Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, The Hollywood Reporter, and The New York Times.

Artists, musicians, actors, and world leaders have all passed in front of his camera, but his work never depended on the names he photographed. It depends on something else: the ability to reveal what remains hidden. Alongside this, he has built an artistic body of work gathered in books and exhibitions such as Torero, Sombra, Ángel Gitano, Mil Besos, and Hijas del Agua. Among them, AFANADOR stands out — a singular project created together with the National Ballet of Spain: a stage piece born from the imagery of his books Ángel Gitano and Mil Besos, whose name evokes an endless search. These are projects that consolidate a deeply personal outlook on identity, beauty, and what it means to represent someone. During the early conversations about the project, Ruvén told us that Chevignon sounded familiar to him, like a word that was already part of his memory. And that part of that memory was tied to a jacket.

@ruvenafanador