“He is a social photographer in Tijuana,” she says, “and Maria Elvia’s family were his customers since he began his studio in 1972. She respects my father and his work, so the initial approach was easy.”

Maria Elvia manages a “city within a city”, with 19 children, 45 bodyguards, 850 dogs, countless zoo animals and much more. “I imagine it’s like being royalty,” says Venegas, whose work tends to focus on how people choose to represent themselves, but also on how they try to control that perception in the eyes of others. Maria Elvia was the perfect subject, although Venegas got lucky when she went to persuade her to take part, saying she wanted to make “a kind of homage to Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas”, the Spaniard’s famous painting of the Infanta Margarita surrounded by her entourage. “It turned out she had studied art history for many years, and Las Meninas was one of her favourite paintings of all time.

“To work with her was a challenge, not only because it would take a great deal of negotiation, but also because there was a broader subject to represent than anything I’d attempted before,” she says. “One of the things that I find makes this subject for me is that it has an identity built by many elements taken from faraway worlds; the family comes from a kind of political royalty, not always loved, which made it all the more interesting. I was intrigued and attracted by this challenge since I thought that it was a hard-to-find subject, one that had so many elements in which I was interested.” Another drawing factor was the fact that Maria Elvia lives in Tijuana, where the photographer grew up.

Now, the photographs have been published as a book, have won the Magnum Expression Photography Award (BJP #7783), sponsored by HP, and will go on show this summer at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City. In the meantime, Venegas is working on a new project that explores how social and class histories can be engraved in people’s gestures and poses. “It is still in the beginning stage, which tends to be confusing, but I am very excited about it.”