Dominique Muñoz’s Layered Perspectives

Fine Arts Work Center visual art fellow Dominique Muñoz uses strategically placed mirrors in his photography. Photo: Agata Storer

Strewn around Dominique Muñoz’s studio at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown are the tools and accessories of a photographer: strobes, a large silver reflector, spring clamps, and a 4×5 large-format camera, which Muñoz describes as “old-school.”

“You put the cloth over your head and look through the viewfinder,” he says. But cameras aren’t just tools of expression for Muñoz. They’re also subjects he examines in work that addresses complications of the human gaze and the history of photography.

In Self-Portrait as Shadow (Colorful Textile), Muñoz, whose family is originally from Guatemala, considers the history of portraiture and how the camera was used in some places to categorize whole communities as “other.” To make this image, he used a photo of himself he had taken in front of a childhood blanket. He printed the image and cut himself out, leaving a silhouette. He then placed that print with the cutout in front of the same blanket but with the opposite side of the thread showing and used lights to create a deep shadow to highlight the figure.

“I thought about portraiture and how the silhouette still allows the body to be seen but without subjugating it,” says Muñoz. “The portraits in my work refuse the negative and violent way of looking that the camera did to communities.”