The Male Body as Canvas: Victor Minguez Featured in Inspiró Magazine Issue 7

Mark Dunn
2026-04-14T01:12:54-07:00

There is a particular kind of silence that lives inside Victor Minguez's photographs. No names. No faces. No distractions. Just the nude human body, stripped of identity, exposed to concept, and oﬀered to the viewer as something surprisingly open and intimate.

Minguez, a Valencia-based Spanish photographer with over two decades of award-winning work behind him, is one of the artists we're proud to feature in Inspiró Magazine Issue 7. His work challenges the way we see the body, not as spectacle, but as vessel.

From Design and Psychology to the Darkroom of the Self

Minguez didn't arrive at photography through a straight path. He began studying both design and psychology before abandoning each, drawn instead toward a medium that could hold all of it at once, the visual language of design, the interior landscapes of psychology, and something more ineﬀable: emotion, thought, the unspeakable.

"After starting my studies in design and psychology, I left both finding in photography the perfect vehicle of expression," he has said. "Through this, I like to capture my ideas, thoughts, feelings, emotions."

That psychological foundation never left him. It pulses quietly through every image, in the stillness of his subjects, in the deliberate absence of faces, in the sense that something is being worked through rather than simply shown.

The Face You'll Never See

One of the most distinctive hallmarks of Minguez's work is what he chooses to withhold: the face. By concealing or removing his subjects' identifying features, he performs a kind of elegant erasure, eliminating individuality to access something more universal.

"I like to use the nude, and even many times, cover the faces of my models because with it, I eliminate all identity or trait of individuality," he explains. "You could say that my naked models are like blank canvases, neutral surfaces on which to capture the work I want to create."

The eﬀect is quietly radical. Without a face to anchor our gaze, we stop reading the person and start reading the image. We stop asking who and begin asking what, what is being felt, what is being carried, what is being released. The body becomes the text.

Ordinary People, Extraordinary Stillness

Minguez isn't interested in professional models or polished, performative poses. He seeks out ordinary people, those who simply want to be seen and are willing to be guided. This choice is intentional and philosophically consistent with his vision: the body he photographs should feel like any body. Like your body.

"For my projects, I prefer to collaborate with non-professional people, ordinary people who simply want to be portrayed and let themselves be guided by my vision and ideas," he says.

His aesthetic is sober and close to minimalist. There are no elaborate sets, no busy backgrounds, no props to distract. The naked body and the concept it carries are the absolute protagonists.

"The intention is that the viewer's gaze is not distracted by superfluous information, allowing, at the same time, that perhaps he can be reflected in that universalized body."

There it is, that word, reflected. Minguez doesn't just want you to look at his images. He wants you to see yourself in them.

Between the Plan and the Moment

His process moves between two poles: the meticulously preconceived and the spontaneously discovered. Some images are planned in granular detail before a single shutter click. Others unfurl during the shoot itself, the idea flowing, developing, growing, and sometimes transforming into something entirely unexpected.

This duality keeps his work alive. The controlled and the organic. The known and the emergent. What appears as serene minimalism on the surface is often the result of a process in motion.

His subjects, in turn, inhabit states of deep interiority, reflection, serenity, and what Minguez describes as "a certain vulnerability." They are not performing for the camera. They are, in a sense, simply being, and being observed.

An Artist With Deep Roots

Minguez's career is extensive and hard-won. His curriculum reads like a map of Spanish
contemporary photography, with first prizes at the Concurso Nacional de Fotografía La Litera, the Certamen de Creación Digital Taboracrom, and the Concurso estatal Villa de Almussafes, among many others. His work has been exhibited from Valencia to Madrid, from Tenerife to Mallorca, in spaces including the Círculo de Bellas Artes and the IVAM Centre Julio González. Most recently he earned recognition at the LXV concurso de fotografía de Junta Central Fallera in 2025.

He has shown in solo and collective exhibitions for more than twenty years, building a body of work that is quietly consistent in its vision and quietly bold in its philosophy.

Why Inspiró

Inspiró was created to amplify the voices of queer artists working at the intersection of
vulnerability and vision, artists whose work doesn't simply document LGBTQ+ life but
expands what it can look like and feel like. Victor Minguez fits that mission exactly.
His work doesn't shout. It doesn't need to. It invites you to slow down, to sit with discomfort, to recognize something of yourself in a faceless, nameless body on a page. In an era of relentless image overload, that kind of quiet insistence is its own form of courage.

Inspiró Magazine Issue 7 is available now. Pick up your copy to see Victor Minguez's full feature, along with the other extraordinary artists, photographers, and storytellers in this issue.

Visit Victor Minguez's portfolio at vminguez.wordpress.com