''Whether we're born in Buenos Aires, Havana or Madrid, we come into this world with dance in our hearts,'' Isabel Muñoz says.

The famous Spanish photographer, known for her intimate images of bodies in motion, is sitting on a lounge chair at the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in downtown Miami. She's relaxed in a black pullover and black slacks, her red-framed reading glasses and green, open-toed shoes her only brushes of color.

Muñoz's minimalist look and the poetry in her words fit the stunning, large-scale photographs the 57-year-old artist is exhibiting at CIFO through Oct. 5. Clean, deconstructed views of dancers around the world, the silver prints evoke feelings of love and desire, hope and dignity.

They celebrate life with elegance even in the midst of death, a fact viewers also can appreciate in Muñoz's sensual black-and-white image of a bullfighter's triumphant pose, or in the color photograph of wedding dresses fitted on mannequins in the middle of a dusty street after an earthquake in Iran.

''My photographs are a pretext to talk about the things that are a constant in my life and that excite me,'' says Muñoz, who has spent the last 17 years traveling the world. ``I'm an optimistic person, and I like to see all that is positive. Even in the harshest moments, there is beauty, and the dignity of human beings comes through.''

Sexuality and identity play starring roles in her compositions.

IN THE DETAIL

Through Muñoz's eyes, the cocked hands of a dancer in Cambodia, the bountiful lips of an African, the silhouetted hips of a Cuban become dramatic geographical landscapes to be studied in detail. Those Havana hips answer all questions about how -- and why -- Cubans invented the mambo.

In another photograph, the firm grip with which a man in Buenos Aires tugs at his tango partner speaks to their male-dominant culture. A poised flamenco dancer with her back to the camera wears her mantilla as if it were armor.

''She's one of the two most important photographers in Spain,'' says María del Valle, director of the Spanish Cultural Center (Centro Cultural Español) in Coral Gables, which is presenting Isabel Muñoz Photographs jointly with CIFO.

Some of Muñoz's photographs are simply beautiful images of dancers captured in exuberant movement. Nude dancers in geometric formation seem suspended in space. A ballerina and her tutu take fanciful flight. A man's hand tenderly claims its place in the curve of his female partner's back.

Chinese acrobats are twisted into unimaginable shapes, and the chalky, swollen foot of a gymnast, with its harsh pores, tests the viewer's perceptions of beauty and graceful strength.

Likewise, Muñoz's work in Africa, photographs of women of the Ethiopian Hammer and Surma tribes who ''dress with nature'' and whose painted bodies are ''like a book,'' is a powerful contemplation on identity ``in a culture that lives with its back to progress.''

''I'm always observing,'' says Muñoz who picked up her first camera, a Kodak Instamatic bought with Christmas money from her grandmother, when she was 13.

''I like to look inside people and see things,'' she says. ``But I don't photograph eyes. The eyes tell too much.''

She also doesn't photograph her banker son and two grandchildren much.

``They don't let me!''

The CIFO exhibit also includes photographs and portraits Muñoz took in the aftermath of the powerful earthquake that struck southeastern Iran on Dec. 26, 2003, killing thousands and destroying most of the city of Bam. The series' most poignant photograph captures a woman in a black burqa at the moment she arrives at what was once her house, picks up a bit of chalk from the ground and begins to write her lost relatives' names on the ruins of a wall.

IMMIGRATION PROJECT

In Miami for the exhibit's opening, Muñoz, who was born in Barcelona and has lived in Madrid since 1970, is off next to the mountainous Mexican border with Guatemala to work on a new project on immigration issues.

''It's an incredible story, tough work,'' she says, but so was last year's project photographing the culture of violence among Salvadorean gangs. With a help of a priest who is trying to rehabilitate gang members, she spent months visiting prisons to photograph the tattooed bodies of men and women, their secret codes and their interactions with the relatives who visited them.

''Even there I witnessed love,'' she says.

''To rest my soul,'' she adds after a pause, ``I take a break and go to Brazil, where I'm doing a photographic study of identity. The cultural mix in Brazil is fascinating, as is the dance.''

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