In 1923 the government of Primo de Rivera decided to conceal the belt of misery that encircled the city from the sight of the expected visitors to the Ibero-American Exposition in 1929. Years ago, in that unholy suburb where children died in misery and the only comfort their mothers were left was a photograph of an inert corpse, they found a building that turned out to be the biggest, cheapest, foulest-smelling brothel in the province. This is the story of two great women, Davinia and Che, that begins in 1882, when Cristina Salazar Expósito is 13 years old and the nuns at the Santisima Trinidad Hopsice find her a servant's position there. Under the purest tradition of magical realism, The Dead Children's Photographer takes us into a time that flits between the oily light of kerosene and the modernity of a world recently illuminated by the brilliance of electricity.