Ground Rules is Alejandro Cartagena’s first retrospective, featuring his documentary photography, collage, appropriation of found photographs, and AI-generated works. Living in Mexico since the age of 13, Cartagena reflected on his life in the area and its changing landscapes. His output is unified by his commitment to addressing Mexico’s most pressing social, economic, and environmental issues.
The artist as project photographer
Highlighting work from over 20 series, we see the artist’s method: conducting extensive research, then establishing constraints on elements such as format, subject matter, or location to define the subject. During this process, Cartagena amasses hundreds of photographs around a topic. The meanings emerge through accumulation, and no photograph is more important than another. The exhibition traces, for the first time, recurring concerns across his career, including land use, the United States–Mexico border, climate change, widening wealth disparities, and the effects of rapid suburban sprawl. The exhibition also demonstrates how Cartagena uses archival sources, photobooks, large-scale installations, and AI to expand the possibilities of photography.
Early years and art about the border
Identidad Nuevo León (2005), Cartagena’s first large-scale project, was about himself and his fellow residents of Nuevo León, a state in Mexico. With Ruben Marcos, he set up a mobile studio and spent a year photographing 800 people in 25 municipalities, each sitter offering their own style and presence. In the 2004–05 series Espacios Habitables (Living Spaces), the artist returned to his birthplace in the Dominican Republic, inviting passersby to take portraits in front of places from his youth in the style of a tourist snapshot.
Cartagena began a trilogy of projects in 2009 about the United States/Mexico border: Between Borders (2009–10), Americanos (2012–14), and Without Walls (2017). The subject is approached from a broader perspective of identity, the psychological impact of the border itself, and what it represents as an invisible socioeconomic force shaping perceptions and lives.
‘Carpoolers and Suburban Bus’
Carpoolers (2011–12) asks: What happens when suburban expansion outpaces public infrastructure? Standing on a pedestrian overpass, the artist shot aerial photos of flatbed trucks containing laborers packed tightly into the truck beds. The colorful pictures resulting from these “God views” of people crammed into trucks like cattle reduce the human figure to an abstract collection of shapes.
Suburban Bus (2016) is the result of three days and nights during which the artist took the bus to retrace his commute on his way to work at his family’s restaurant during the years 1993 to 2004. The viewer has the point of view of a huddled passenger. Some stand, others sit, and the packed bodies sway with the motion of the bus in a slow motion of exhausted solitude that is the life of the long-distance commuter.
‘Photo Structures’ and ‘We Are Things’
Cartagena began experimenting with collage in 2016, using his own photos, and then shifted to small, black-and-white vernacular photos gathered from Mexican flea markets and landfills. In Photo Structures (2018–19) (pictured above), the artist carefully excised figures from found images, leaving only the background. This exercise revealed the formal patterns of photography and its common poses, angles, and backdrops while pondering what new meanings they take on when the subject is gone.
Cartagena’s most recent video series, We Are Things (2025), revisits his interest in archival imagery. Using an AI image generator on his personal archive brought the project full circle, blending digital and analog with early found photographs. The resulting moody, atmospheric imagery creates a warm experience akin to flipping through a family photo album.
Alejandro Cartagena’s images speak to his life in Mexico, but the power of the photographs transcends geography and opens the viewer to larger questions about our shared human experience. “Photography changed our world two centuries ago; the way we see it, and the way we think about it has never been the same since we started using it,” said Cartagena. “I want to be a part of that history of how the medium transformed our understanding of social, political, and environmental issues through images.”