Alejandro Cartagena, Carpoolers #38, 2011-2012. Image courtesy of the Artist.
Thursday, November 3, 2016, 5:00 PM | Center for Creative Photography 108
Lecture: Alejandro Cartagena 2006-2016; Building narratives around the dream of home-ownership, suburbs and a sense of place.
Alejandro Cartagena’s work traverses the struggle we face following the ideals of a capitalistic system while striving for fairer cities in which to live. The different aspects of his project, Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented Cities propose alternate narratives, which depict a global issue from a local perspective. The project sheds light on the implemented neo-liberal economic strategies made by the Mexican Government since 2001 that have pushed growth out of the regulation of the metropolitan urban plan creating an environment in which developers urbanize in ways where profit is sought out over the well-being of the community.
Bio: Alejandro Cartagena lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His work has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and the West Collection. He has received the Photolucida Critical Mass book award, the Lente Latino award, Chile, the Premio Salon de la Fotografia from the Fototeca de Nuevo Leon and the Premio IILA-Fotografia 2012 award in Rome. He has published several books including Suburbia Mexicana (2012 Photolucida/Daylight), Carpoolers (2014), Before the War (2015), Rivers of Power (2016), and Santa Barbara return jobs back to US (2016 Skinnerboox). Additionally, Cartegena’s work has been published internationally in Newsweek, the Financial Times, the New Yorker, and Wallpaper.
