The Fierce and Seductive Men of Flamenco

This essay is drawn from the conclusion to the author’s photo book “Ángel Gitano.”

My life with flamenco began when, as a child in Colombia, I would hear mythical tales about the gypsies, the gitanos, who for centuries had roamed the sun-drenched plains of southern Spain. Hearing of their chants and trancelike dances so inspired me that, over the years, and without ever seeing one flamenco performance, I created my own version of what these enchanting creatures looked like—how they would laugh, love, cry, sing, and dance—and how they embraced the endless arid landscape of Andalusia.

During those years of my childhood and to this day, I never think of a flamenco performance on a traditional stage. My vision has always remained the same: a gypsy alone, out of doors in the blinding desert sun, wailing while enacting a sequence of improvised yet ritualistic gestures, against white-washed walls on the remote Iberian coast. Always wandering, always of dark, lustrous skin and black-rimmed eyes. Always sensuous, untamed, and eternal.

Later on, during my first year living in New York, when my career as a photographer was just beginning, I finally saw a real flamenco performance when María Benítez and her company came to the Joyce Theatre, in Chelsea. I was so taken by the song and dance, so hypnotized and seduced by the intense passion, that afterward, on an impulse, I waited for the legendary flamenca outside the theatre to ask her—beg her, if necessary—to allow me to photograph her. A few days later in Soho, on the roof of the Puck Building, against a white wall in the early afternoon sun, María Benítez posed and danced for me. With her long black hair, sweaty skin, and deep dark eyes, wearing black shoes and black garments, she was a rare beauty, a complete opposite of the women I had photographed up to then. She was older, tragic, silent sometimes. Other times loud, impassioned, abandoned.

Many years and many photographs later, on a blustery winter night in Paris, as I tried to wind down in my dark hotel room after a long day of shooting, I came across a television program that deeply affected me. A singularly arresting woman was singing a flamenco song with fervent ardor. Very big and perfectly groomed, she was beautiful and grotesque at the same time. Strangely sensual, her moonlike face and fleshy body captured my eyes and imagination. I could not get enough of the spellbinding moment. At the end of the performance, her name flashed on the screen: Falete.

I realized, in that very instant, that I wanted to do a book about female flamenco gypsies. The next day I called my producer, Monica Scarello, and asked her to find me the amazing woman I had seen on the television screen.

A few days later, Monica called to say that she could not find the woman that I had so meticulously described to her. Instead, she found a man called Falete, who seemed to be a singer of note. I asked her to send me his photograph. I was perplexed when I saw it: an image of an ordinary overweight, even rotund, man, wearing a cap. I stared at the picture. I could barely see his eyes through his tinted glasses, yet the round shape of his face, his posture, and the way he held his hands were unmistakable. Without a doubt he was the performer from the television show in my hotel in Paris.

Over the next two and a half years, I travelled to Spain on numerous occasions, shooting my homage to the gypsy women of flamenco. Toward the end, I got to photograph Falete, on a blazing hot afternoon, in a quarry deep in the south of Andalusia, and the magic of the experience with him helped to inspire my recent book on the men of flamenco, “Ángel Gitano.”

If the women of flamenco introduced me to a lush vision of womanhood—reckless, unafraid, remorseless—it was the men of flamenco who took me into a surreal milieu populated by primal archetypes of fierce egos, larger-than-life gitanos, undaunted and tribal. To this day, the staged flamenco performances I have seen I can count on one hand, and I can’t imagine the number will grow with time. I don’t want it to, as no show can compare to what it was like to have my beautiful flamencas and narcissistic flamencos performing just for me, and under my spell, in the bright desert light.

An exhibition of “Ángel Gitano: The Men of Flamenco” opens at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles on May 7th.