Alejandro Cartagena, Mexico Point-Blank
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is devoting its first retrospective to Alejandro Cartagena, a photographer renowned for his striking images exploring the US–Mexico border.
By Guénola Pellen. Photos by Alejandro Cartagena.
Perched on a pedestrian bridge overlooking Highway 85 in Monterrey, Alejandro Cartagena spent a year photographing workers commuting to job sites in the beds of pickup trucks. Seen from above, each vehicle becomes a tiny stage where men doze, unbuckled, surrendered to a vulnerability that repetition elevates into political statement. “Construction workers were buying homes an hour or more from where they worked, and there was no public transportation for them, so I started documenting how people were using their cars,” the photographer says of the “Carpoolers” series.
Born in the Dominican Republic in 1977, Alejandro Cartagena has lived and worked in Monterrey, Mexico, since 1990. His practice centers on exploring landscape as a tool for observing the cultural, social, and political constructions that shape Latin American societies.
In “Suburban Bus”, he retraces the route he once traveled while working at his family’s restaurant between 1993 and 2004. Hands gripping overhead bars, bodies swaying in the predawn gloom — he captures the silent exhaustion of those the metropolis swallows and spits back out at the edge of night.
With photographer Rubén Marcos, he set up a white backdrop in front of malls and churches across Nuevo León, inviting more than 800 strangers to pose. Tube tops, low-rise jeans, BlackBerry phones in hand — each subject brings their own swagger or shyness, a vivid sketch of an era.
“Rivers of Power” documents the devastation wrought by Hurricane Alex, which turned the usually dry Santa Catarina riverbed in Monterrey into a destructive flood. Weaving his own photographs with news imagery, Cartagena questions how we frame — and tame — catastrophe.
His trilogy “Invisible Line” probes the border between the United States and Mexico — not as a line on a map, but as a force that shapes lives on both sides. A mother and daughter touch through a metal barrier: restriction, here, does not abolish connection.
Cartagena conceives the photobook as a living form. A Small Guide to Homeownership fits between two palms, modest and incisive — a distillation of his exploration of housing in Mexico. With twenty-seven books published, he reminds us that images only acquire their full meaning in sequence.
The exhibition “Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules” is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through April 19, 2026.
The exhibition catalogue, Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules, is published by Aperture and available for $65.
