San Miguel de Allende’s Alborada Festival starts at 4 AM. Actually it was closer to 2 AM. The main Jardin gets packed way before that, but 4 is when it kicks off. Mexicans are serious about their parties. I’ve been in quite a few large scale parties — Songkran, Chinese New Year, New Year’s Eve in New York. San Miguel’s Alborada deserves a spot among those, it’s a hell of a party and it lasts for four or five days.
I won’t pretend to understand all of it, but the highlight for me was a particular group of dancers, La Sagrada Familia. I ended up photographing them many times over the months. I am actually not 100 percent sure that this gentleman was part of that group, but his dress and face paint fits. This was a random shot grabbed in the blink of an eye and then he was gone.
I would like to have made a portrait, but I never did see him again during the festival or in the next nine months we called San Miguel home. Sometimes all you get is an instant.
You can download the Darktable preset I used in this video here.