Click.

Alejandra, heart pounding, did the only thing she could. She grabbed her camera.

She walked barefoot into the gallery. The lights were off, but the photos on the walls were glowing—softly, like screens left on too long. And there, in the center of the room, stood a figure she didn’t recognize.

Alejandra Morales never considered herself a model. She was the curator —the quiet woman behind the camera at “Suenos,” her tiny but influential fashion gallery in Mexico City’s Roma Norte district. Her walls were covered not with paintings, but with large-format fashion photos. She called them fotos de Alejandra , though the subjects were always other people.