Latin Lover

Latin Lover is the second chapter of ‘Hola Mi Amol’ – my first photobook (2019).

While both projects focus on Dominican men,‘Latin Lover’ portrays Dominican men living in the US, and more specifically, the Dominican community of New-York City – the biggest outside the Dominican Republic.

It was in 2018 that I stayed in New-York City for 3 months, in order to meet as many young Dominican men as possible (or mixed like me).They would be born and raised in the US, or recently immigrated.

With them, I started conversations about the social stereotypes applied to Latino men today. I asked them about their education as boys and then men, their families.

They would tell me about how they felt so distant from the idea of the Latino man or even the Dominican man as it’s portrayed today. A new generation of men has come to break the idea of hyper sexualized, overly masculine, macho men.They have come to deconstruct the myth of the Latin Lover.While in ‘Hola Mi Amol’ I aggressively dived into such stereotyped situations and characters, here I take a step back, and let the subjects take main role in the project. I wanted to show that there are many ways to represent masculinity while reversing the male gaze.

The result is a dance of dressing and undressing, of moving around a bedroom, as I wanted them to pose as they pleased, and to try to step away from the expected ways of presenting themselves to a camera, and to a woman.

I find interesting how you can’t really decide why the work might seem feminine : is it because of me, is it because of them letting go, or simply because we automatically assign something that is not overly masculine, to feminine ? These beautiful, moving and dancing men deserve more representation. A ‘Latin Lover’ should only be what it describes, and not automatically reference an obsolete racist stereotype, brought up by how white men see Latin American men.

I would want to finish this piece in collaboration with a Dominican writer. The idea would be to present this collection of portraits (there is more), and finish the interviews in NYC, to have a video piece with parts of our conversations. Eventually, I would also love to develop a performance piece, in collaboration with a female Dominican writer and musician, to then present it along an exhibition.