Ruven Afanador’s Ángel Gitano: The Men of Flamenco fixes its attention on the male figures of Andalusian flamenco: dancers above all, but also musicians and members of the wider Gitano milieu. Made in southern Spain, the photographs move between arranged poses and bodies caught in motion. Costume, nudity, gesture, and physical bearing become parallel means of describing a culture in which performance and self-presentation are closely entwined.

The book’s black-and-white language joins two modes that are often kept apart. Its theatrical styling and heightened glamour recall fashion photography, while its concentration on particular performers, places, and traditions retains a documentary impulse. Afanador does not treat flamenco simply as choreography. He attends equally to bravado, erotic charge, youthful intensity, and the classical forms that persist beneath the spectacle. The resulting portraits occupy an unstable, productive ground between observation and invention.

Ángel Gitano also follows Afanador’s Mil Besos, a body of work centered on the women of flamenco. The shift toward men creates a companion study rather than a repetition: masculinity, exposure, adornment, and disciplined movement now structure the frame. Seen in this context, the book contributes to a broader photographic account of how gender is performed within flamenco culture, while preserving the pronounced stylization of Afanador’s practice.

Published by Rizzoli in 2014, the 240-page hardcover gives this concentrated subject substantial space. For a collector, its interest lies not in undocumented claims of scarcity but in the coherence of the project: an extended black-and-white portrait study linking dance, fashion, the nude, and cultural observation. It merits attention as a substantial example of a photobook using staged image-making to complicate, rather than merely illustrate, a living performance tradition.