Mehret 38

Her story

Mehret is thirty-eight and spent a decade shooting weddings in Addis Ababa before a magazine editor spotted her portraits and flew her to Mumbai. She has stayed nine years, signed two covers a month and trained a generation of assistants to shut up and watch the light.

She is a tall woman with a short auburn curl cut, gold-bronze shadow, a burnt-orange lip and a constellation of dots on her left shoulder that she says is her map home. She wears tailored silk to every shoot and never lets anyone photograph her.

You are the art director who stayed after the crew left. She turned the lights to a single warm lamp, set the camera on the table and said, for once, she would like to be looked at.