When he was 11 and living in the Dominican Republic, Alejandro Cartagena started taking a bird watching class. The students went on field trips, took photos and learned how to develop the film. Cartagena enjoyed it, but after a couple of years, he became more interested in skateboarding and hanging out with his friends.
In his mid-20s, Cartagena relied on some of those early lessons when he got his first camera. He says it gave him an opportunity to go places and take pictures. He started taking classes in Monterrey, Mexico, where his family had moved, and built his own darkroom so he could develop his photos of landscapes. He liked it enough to leave his job at his parents’ tamale restaurant and try photography full time.
“I was enthralled with the idea that images can mean things,” he said. “I know that sounds maybe naive, but it really was an awakening of, ‘Wow, there’s something that one can do with images that is unique to image making.’ And I just wanted to give it a go.”
That leap of faith paid off when a few months later, Cartagena was selected for a portfolio review at a photography festival in Guanajuato, Mexico, and was chosen as one of the top 10 artists. Cartagena began taking photography courses, which taught him to think about the different ways an image can be interpreted. In 2008, he traveled to Spain to take a workshop with acclaimed documentary photographer Paul Graham. Cartagena, now 49, said this pushed him beyond creating photographs to capturing images that told stories.
In “Ground Rules,” a mid-career retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, on view through April 19, Cartagena’s devotion to working with photographic series presents visitors with powerful themes that capture a strong sense of place and time. “Constructions” shows him taking photos of himself in his parents’ basement; “Turismo” features photos he asked people to take of him in front of places he remembered as a child in the Dominican Republic, where he lived until he was 13; and “Without Walls” presents photos of real and symbolic divisions on the U.S.-Mexico border.
Shana Lopes, SFMOMA’s assistant photography curator and exhibition organizer, first saw Cartagena’s images in 2019. She said she was struck by the work and care he put into building up a group of photos that invite the viewer in and tell a story rather than staking a “decisive moment,” as some photographers do.
Lopes cited as an example Cartagena’s “Suburbia Mexicana,” for which he spent more than a dozen years documenting suburban sprawl and its consequences near Monterrey, the city where he and his family lived after leaving the Dominican Republic.
Lopes said by showing issues from multiple vantage points, Cartagena gives viewers a way to understand the impact of what they are seeing. With this series, the artist shows not just the people who live in the new suburbs, but also the buildings, the new development’s effects on rivers, and urban downtowns hollowed out due to people moving out of cities.
“Alejandro’s work is very accessible conceptually to people,” Lopes said. “He’s not trying to trick anybody with his work. He’s trying to invite us into his process.”
She added: “It’s almost like he googled what happens like when there’s a big increase in suburban development, and then he starts to look at the idea in different ways.”
Cartagena said he witnessed the effect of the housing boom in Monterrey in the early 2000 when the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s power ended after decades with the election of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party.
Government officials modified the constitution to establish these suburbs, Cartagena said. They worked with private development companies, and often the construction of homes was rushed and shoddy, marked by failing water and sewage systems, leaky roofs and electrical short circuits. The Los Angeles Times described the construction boom and its attendant failings in “A failed vision.”
“A bunch of land that before was not possible to think of as land that could be a suburbanized, suddenly was,” Cartagena said, recalling that era. “And you had five, six companies that took over, in coordination with the government to create this housing program that developed millions of homes all over Mexico.”
“Where I’m from, in Monterrey, you started seeing these suburban sprawl developments happening all over the place,” he said. “I was still working with my parents at the restaurant, and we started to see both the benefit and the unintended consequences of that rapid development. Yes, we were getting more business because suddenly this small suburb town of 60,000 people ended up being a suburban town of half a million people. That’s in less than six years.”
The consequences of this fast-paced expansion were that transit systems, highways and environmental protections could not keep pace with building, the photographer said. Another cost was security, as drug cartels took the opportunity to move into the suburbs.
“There were 100 police men for 60,000 people, and then there’s suddenly half a million people, and you still have the same 100 police,” Cartagena said. “At the height of the drug war, you had whole police departments taken to jail and the militarizing of small suburban towns because there was no way to control the problematic situation with the drug cartels in the suburbs.”
After Cartagena created “Suburbia Mexicana,” officials at a research institute approached him about doing a project on car culture in Monterrey. He accepted the assignment.
Cartagena was not sure how to start, and then he read a paper that said if you don’t see traffic, it’s like it doesn’t exist. After that, he started taking photos from elevated places so he could see the cars traveling the highways. That led to “Carpoolers,” probably his most well-known project.
“I looked straight down, and I saw a truck with people in the back, and I took the picture, and I was completely amazed by the image,” he said. “I was like, ‘Wait a minute, I know this. This is Latin America. I’ve seen this.’ I’ve traveled that way, and my grandfather, who was a construction worker, also traveled this way.”
To create the work, Cartagena stood on the same pedestrian overpass several times a week, from about 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., to photograph landscapers and construction workers in the backs of trucks. They travel this way because they have no reliable and safe public transit to get to their jobs.
San Francisco’s Catharine Clark Gallery included images from “Carpoolers” in a 2025 show with Arleene Correa Valencia and in January at its booth at San Francisco’s largest art fair, FOG Design + Art. That show also featured pieces by Valencia and work by Native Hawaiian artist Lehuauakea.
Anton Stuebner, the director of the gallery, said that Cartagena’s photos, dealing with migration, storytelling and displacement, worked perfectly with the other two artists.
“I love how it’s both sort of reflection and portal,” he said. “It lets people see their own stories reflected back to them as well as the stories of others.”
Credit: Tenari Tuatagaloa / San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Lopes, who grew up in San Francisco, said she thinks Cartagena’s work is particularly relevant here since it deals with the critical Bay Area issues of housing and development.
Cartagena described how the themes in his photography transcend borders. The topography and place of his photos are specific to Mexico, he said, but the way suburbanization has happened in many parts of the world makes them universal.
“We can talk of an Austrian suburbanization that happened in the 1970s and we can talk about the American suburbanization,” he said. “It’s eerie how close the rhetoric of why one needs a home is to the imaging that is created around the ideal of home ownership. Those things don’t change. It doesn’t matter if you’re here or in the US or in Europe. There is this propaganda machine of what it looks like to have a house.”
“Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules” is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through April 19.
