Alejandro Cartagena

Dominican-born photographer Alejandro Cartagena moved to Mexico, his mother’s birthplace, in 1990, and since then, he has developed a dynamic body of work exploring social, urban, and environmental issues, largely through the lens of the contemporary Mexican experience. Cartagena’s series Suburbia Mexicana, which he produced between 2006 and 2009, was profoundly inspired by the work of pioneering Mexican photographer Eugenio Espino Barros. Like Espino Barros, who documented Mexico’s urban spaces and natural landscapes during the first half of the 20th century, Cartagena took to photographing the country’s city centers and countrysides, nearly half a century later. His resulting pictures frankly document new urban growth and altered landscapes—namely the proliferation of serially built homes and their ensuing environmental impact—on the outskirts of the Monterrey Metropolitan Area.

Cartagena also gained traction for his Car Poolers series, for which he shoots aerial photographs of speeding cars from a pedestrian overpass on Monterrey’s Highway 85. His resulting images consistingly capture commuters and assorted items, hidden in the beds of pickup trucks. Cartagena explains, “Car Poolers is a project that continues my visual research on how the Mexican suburbs impact the landscape, the city, and its inhabitants… These images present a not-so-subtle observation of overgrowth issues in Mexico, where suburbs are being built in far away lands, far from the urban centers, causing greater commutes and consumption of gas.”

Cartagena’s work has been exhibited at the Sonoma County Museum, the Bakersfield Museum of Art, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, as well as at a number of Mexican institutions and galleries.