Alejandro Cartagena employs landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban and environmental issues. He is known for his formally engaging and socially incisive images that span the politics of the US-Mexico border, suburban sprawl, and the increasing wealth disparities in North America. Though rooted in Mexico, Cartagena’s photographic series speak to shared global conditions of migration, environmental crisis, and unchecked development.

Ground Rules is the first comprehensive survey charting his prolific career. In this publication he deploys the diverse array of his photographic formats, from documentary and collage to the appropriation of vernacular photographs and AI-generated imagery.

Published to coincide with Alejandro Cartagena’s 2025/26 solo exhibition at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

“My fascination with photography came after I left the Dominican Republic for Mexico at the age of 13 and found images in my family album as a place for stories of my past. I became enamored with the idea that a picture can tell stories, some real, some not. I would devour those photo albums every afternoon, because I felt lost in my transition to Mexico. I became a photographer not because of aesthetic or conceptual ideas, but because there was an emotional connection with storytelling.

“Two things I’ve been obsessed with are place and personhood. I’m trying to figure out where I belong in those stories. As an outsider, there’s a low-grade permanent anxiety present — you’re never from here, yet you’re here. It’s also an opportunity to comment on cultural norms, things that mean one thing in one culture, but something else in another. I will never completely be of this place, yet I can try to understand it from my perspective, and that manifests in my photography.”
- Alejandro Cartagena