Alejandro Cartagena

Alejandro Cartagena is a Mexican photographer, born in 1977 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, who lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects use landscape and portraiture to examine social, urban and environmental issues, most famously in Carpoolers (2011 to 2012), shot from a pedestrian overpass looking down at laborers commuting in the beds of pickup trucks as suburban expansion outpaced public infrastructure. His work sits in the collections of SFMOMA, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the George Eastman House and many others, and SFMOMA announced his first retrospective, Ground Rules. He is a prolific self publisher and photobook editor, with award winning titles including Suburbia Mexicana, Carpoolers, A Guide to Infrastructure and Corruption and A Small Guide to Homeownership. In the NFT world he is a co founder of Fellowship, the platform and gallery that built the digital photography market from the ground up, and is associated with the daily.xyz project. In recent years he has moved deep into AI, arguing that machine learning offers a point of view no human can develop, one born from machines describing images to each other, with GAN based series such as We Sell Houses and The Latent Space.

Documentary rooted photography of urbanization in Mexico, spanning portraiture and landscape, published heavily in photobook form. Named series include Carpoolers, Suburbia Mexicana, the Santa Barbara series and Photo Structure. Recent work uses GANs and AI trained on his own archives, shown through Fellowship, where he is also a co founder and curator.

• Carpoolers (2011 to 2012)
• Suburbia Mexicana (2005 to 2010)
• Co founder of Fellowship, the NFT photography platform
• Work in SFMOMA, Getty and MFAH collections, SFMOMA retrospective Ground Rules
• GAN and AI series such as We Sell Houses and The Latent Space

On the show