Alejandro Cartagena

Biography

Alejandro Cartagena, born in 1977 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, is a photographer and visual artist who has lived and worked in Monterrey, Mexico, since moving there at age thirteen. His practice uses photography and video, often in landscape and portrait form, to investigate questions of identity, place, and the social and environmental consequences of rapid suburban expansion. Cartagena is best known for his acclaimed series and photobook 'Carpoolers' (2011-2012), for which he photographed from a pedestrian overpass on Highway 85, capturing low-wage construction workers commuting into Monterrey packed into the open beds of pickup trucks. Shot from directly above, the resulting images form a striking typology that comments on labor, class visibility, and the lack of adequate public transit for workers displaced to distant, rapidly built suburbs. This body of work sits within a broader project, 'Suburbia Mexicana,' through which Cartagena has continued to document the ecological and social costs of unchecked urban sprawl in his home region. Cartagena's photographs are held in major international museum collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum, and he has been the subject of institutional surveys such as SFMOMA's 'Ground Rules.' Beyond his own photographic practice, Cartagena is a prolific publisher, running Studio Cartagena and co-publishing photobooks by other artists, and he has been active in the NFT space as an early adopter bringing documentary photography into the crypto art world. Across his work, Cartagena remains focused on using the camera as a tool for social observation, foregrounding the human costs of Mexico's shifting urban and suburban landscapes.