Published in 2009, Ruven Afanador’s Mil Besos turns its attention to the women of flamenco. Made in Andalusia, southern Spain, the photographs place dancers against sun-struck walls and austere landscapes, where gesture, dress and bodily presence acquire an almost graphic force. The title—translated as One Thousand Kisses—suggests intimacy, but the book’s emotional register is broader: sensuality is joined by severity, theatricality and defiance.

Afanador works in high-contrast black and white, using the region’s hard daylight to sharpen silhouettes and intensify surfaces. His subjects are not treated as neutral records of a performance tradition. Instead, the dancers enter extravagant, sometimes irreverent scenarios shaped by the photographer’s imagination. Fashion, portraiture and performance overlap; clothing and pose extend the expressive vocabulary of flamenco beyond the stage.

The project also carries a personal history. Afanador, who was born in Colombia, relates these images to memories of his South American childhood and to an early encounter with the erotic energy of the bailaora Maria Benitez. That autobiographical current helps explain the work’s distance from conventional documentation. Andalusia becomes both a specific setting and a space onto which recollection, fantasy and an idealized vision of womanhood are projected.

Issued by Rizzoli International Publications as a 240-page hardcover, Mil Besos gives this sustained body of work room to establish its own visual world. Its significance for a photobook collection lies not in comprehensively describing flamenco, but in showing how a culturally rooted performance form can be reimagined through staged portraiture and fashion photography. For collectors interested in the exchange between choreography, costume, landscape and photographic authorship, it is a substantial statement of Afanador’s approach.