Interview with Alejandro Cartagena

Alejandro Cartagena will release his book, Suburbia Mexicana  in the United States this March. Alejandro Cartagena photographs the particularities of the suburbs of Monterrey, Mexico which are relatively new and often hastily built, reflecting a general disregard for planning. Over the years, various governmental policies resulted in new, decentralized cities with limited infrastructures where the pursuit of immediate financial gain trumped any interest in sustainability.Cartagena captures both the destruction that rapid urbanization has imposed on the landscape and the phenomenon of densely packed housing. He takes pictures of dried-up river beds that attest to the water misallocation and depletion brought about by the construction, and he depicts perpetual rows of tiny houses slicing directly into the foothills of the picturesque mountains that surround Monterrey. Only the landscape appears capable of limiting their proliferation, the mountains and rivers the only forces able to contain their sprawl. Ultimately Cartagena documents the chaos and destruction that result from scant or misguided urban planning. He lives in downtown Monterrey, and he cares deeply about its land, its people, and its future. Understanding that overdevelopment is not just a local problem, he works hard as an artist to share his photographs as one clear plea for responsible, sustainable development in a rapidly changing world.

Daylight co-published Suburbia Mexicana with Photolucida. We interviewed Alejandro on this publication, and his new body of work, Car Poolers.

Kate Levy: Suburbia Mexicana discusses the modern human's relationship with the landscape. There also seems to be a thread that explores the notion of what home has evloved towards. This is echoed in your work, Landscape as Bureaucracy. Can you talk a bit about your own experience of home, and how this translates in your work?

Alejandro Cartagena: My house experience was a broken one as a teenager. Moving from the Dominican Republic to Mexico in 1990 was a major issue that made me more aware of familial and cultural constructs that defined me. I lived in a suburb in DR and was very much in a bubble. In Monterrey, I became mindful of this and it made me feel somewhat cheated of the city life I was now experienceing. I guess that clash of city and suburban living shows up all over my work, and is a driving force for me to comprehend both lifestyles. 

Copyright Alejandro Cartagena, from Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented Cities.

KL: The new series of work, Car Poolers, involves portraits of individuals riding in the back of pickup trucks amongst tools, hardware, and building materieals, in transport to jobs where the individuals are employed constructing suburban developments. Can you talk about the physical process of making the photographs for Car Poolers, and your relationship to the subjects of these portraits?

AC: The images are shot from a high overpass about ten meteres above the cars, in one of the busiest highways in Monterrey. The cars are going about 40 miles per hour, and I am trying to spot them in the distance so I can shoot once they are underneath the bridge. When I am lucky, traffic makes them slow down, making it easier to catch them. Because of recent events in state penetentiaries (44 killed, 30 escapes), cops are monitoring me because of my "unusual" behavior of taking pictures of cars. Yesterday I had three state police cars surround me and just stare for a few minutes. It actually makes it very uncomfortable to shoot.

KL: Suburbia Mexicana encompasses both wide landscapes evoking both the Hudson River School and New Topographics, and tight portraits which are neither iconic nor sympathetic. How has your use of landscapes and portraits evolved into your Car Poolers series, which seems to adhere to a very specific formular of studies that combine portrait and landscape?

AC: I've always been interested in both landscape and portraiture and how they relate to each other. In Car Poolers, I am still looking for this relationship and more specifically how the overgrowth of cities impact these workers lives. I tried to capture this situation from a vantage point that not only represents the literal issue of car-pooling by construction workers, but also gives a hidden view of this both intimate and public action. I wasn't thinking of doing a closed "formula," but I feel it is the best way to represent the idea. 

Copyright Alejandro Cartagena, from Car Poolers.

KL: In Car Poolers, you have chosen to flatten the frame by taking an aerial view; its as if the people in your portraits along for the ride are elements in the cartography of a very complex, interwoven social history. The compositions are, in a sense, landscapes of time, both in the time it takes for one to travel out of the city, and as symbolic of the larger process of suburban development. As we have learned in Suburbia Mexicana, many of the sites to which the subjects of your portraits travel will be left unfinished, as financial uncertainties often force developers to abandon these projects. Can you elaborate on this, and discuss how the element of transportation functions in this work?

AC: I don't know if there is a specific answer to this question or issues you point out. I think many photographers address the same issues or questions you ask in their work, myself included. I feel content to have found a way to portray one of the consequences of suburban sprawl in such a particular way. There is an inevitable relationship between the suburbs and the construction of transit systems for the rich and poor. These images tend to somehow pinpoint a way of life that is difficult and risky, but with very few chances for change. But then again, what would change or progress be for them? Buy an old car? Contribute to the all ready horrible traffic problem? So again, like what I saw happen in my process of doing Suburbia Mexicana, there is no complete wrong or right, it's more of a perspective.

Regarding the issues of the new suburbs being left in mid-construction, Monterrey and the Metro area has started its inevitable implosion. There are more than 100,000 finished and unfinished houses accounted for since 2011 which are being abandoned and eventually vandalized. The causes seem to lean more towards people moving away from the insecurity of the Mexican suburbs and the drug war than that of financial issues. The construction boom is still going strong, even though the houses are not sold in the end. The Mexican Housing Day in London and New York seem to be a clear stand on the money to be made in suburban development in Mexico today: http://mexicanhousingday.com

KL: You seem to work in chapters, where each body of work is comprised of many segments. Do you see Car Poolers evolving into a longer opus? 

AC: I've been thinking of it but I haven't really found a way to do it. For this project I am interested in producing something different. I do like the idea of being able to produce work with a closed or unilateral point of view when it can successfully suggest many of the subject matter's issues. For me, carpooling by these workers is more than just people looking strange lying or sitting in the backs of trucks; it is about their working conditions, the cities lack of proper public transit systems, suburban sparwl or of the risks taken in order to keep their jobs amongst other things. I really feel that with the way I am portraying them, all of this is suggested. 

KL: You hone in on so many intricacies of complex social conditions and relationships between humans and nature, and you are very adept in exploring these complexities. Can you discuss any phenomenons that you feel you have not been able to satisfactorilly unpack photographically?

AC: There are issues that have been on my mind that I am yet to resolve photographically. Some have to do with the drug war in suburbia. the psychological costs of living in the suburbs. I want to find ways to deconstruct and deepen the way we look at these new landscaps in Mexican cities and their effects. Right now I'm working on another idea that deals with un-altered landscapes, or spaces that are maintained or resist "progress" because of a community's commitment to owning their city and what is done to it. It's been hard to represent something that is not visible, like human resistance, without being a news report. 

Alejandro's work may be viewed on his website at http://alejandrocartagena.com