New Rules for Storytelling: The Photography of Alejandro Cartagena

Alejandro Cartagena mobilizes armies of images in his drive to capture Mexico’s most pressing social, economic, and environmental issues. In this interview, learn about the rules and motivations behind his “documentary cubist perspective” and his pushback against the “decisive moment” in photographic storytelling.

What led you to photography?

ALEJANDRO CARTAGENA: 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.

Your work is an attempt to understand Mexico. What are you trying to reconcile?

AC: 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.

Homeownership is a major issue addressed in your work. How did this become a focus?

AC: While documenting spaces and people, I connected that they were all a direct consequence of this capitalist ideal, which has tentacles in so many aspects of cities and capitalist life. If you want a house, who constructs it? What is the bureaucracy behind the permits to build it? To be efficient, it needs to connect to transportation, utilities, communication, and supply systems. My projects come back to a gut feeling that I need to document this.

Your book A Small Guide to Homeownership was modeled after a Dummies how-to guide. How did that come about?

AC: A Guide to Homeownership: Case Study, Mexico was a eureka moment. It took three years to find a solution of how to portray that story, and then, boom. A Dummies guide provided a framework for this cacophony of series I have been building for 15 years that speak to how to be a homeowner from different perspectives, styles, and types of images. Its design is always the same, which invites viewers to lower their guard because it’s familiar.

Working in series is a central approach in your work. What does it help you achieve?

AC: A question you encounter in photography is, what makes it art? I’ve always battled with that. One narrative is the idea of the decisive moment, that the poetry of photography is when something happens in front of a photographer, along with three, four coincidences, and the artist connects them all to create this forever image. Though I subscribe to that to some extent, it dawned on me that there must be other ways to use photography to create meaning. That’s when seriality came into play.

Most of my projects [e.g., Fragmented Cities, Lost Rivers, Carpoolers] are built on seriality. You can see my voice and proposition in the repetition of images and why certain images are next to each other. A viewer takes meaning from the accumulation of photographs, which visualizes a cultural phenomenon more than the poetry of an artist’s photography. That was very seductive to me, and why I continue to do it with my archive practice. It’s very much about finding patterns within archives.

The images in your Border Camera series are screen grabs from a US government camera feed. Was the goal to focus on the ideas behind the images, rather than highlighting the decisive moment?

AC: Exactly. And not to dismiss the amazingness of the decisive moment — there’s a lot of value in that approach, it established and distinguished photography as an art form, stating, “this is our battleground.” I’m excited to present ideas that counter what we are supposed to think of photography, how it’s supposed to be poetic and artistic.

You often impose rules when crafting your series. What’s an example?

AC: For Carpoolers, the first project I did with a digital camera, I decided that I would only take one or two frames of a moment because I felt it would be like not doing much if I were to only use the automatic shutter. Playing this game of chance with the cars soothed my transition into digital images from large-format analog pictures where I only usually do one photograph. I went to the same place at the same time for a year and the same trucks reappeared on different days, weeks, and months. Inadvertently, the project’s theme expanded from workers going to work to the routine of the city and how these micro actions must happen over and over again for the city to function.

Why has Carpoolers struck such a chord?

AC: I’ve asked myself that. Last year when Trump won the election, it went viral. It recently went viral again on Instagram. Since it was published in The Guardian in 2012, it has become a catalyst for stories that people feel connected to about labor conditions, immigration, Mexican culture. The seriality of the project emphasizes that this is a cultural phenomenon, not just a “good picture” by a photographer. I could not have planned for the number of ways people read it. I almost stopped the project because I didn’t think it had legs. But a good friend, Pablo López Luz, said, “This is the project people will remember you for.” I said OK and kept going.

Are your series discrete categories of work, or do they complement each other?

AC: My art reflects this Google search age where there are many ways to think about the same idea. You type “house” into a search bar and get a hundred thousand ideas of what a house is. Going back to my work on homeownership, it’s almost twenty different series, each with a different style and mode for understanding it, but all pointing to whether we have considered homeownership from the public transportation, labor, ecological, or family perspective. I see my practice as a type of documentary cubist perspective of looking at a subject from many viewpoints to create not a heavy-handed opinion, but a nuanced, open-ended perspective.

You’re a prolific photobook publisher. Why do you like them, and how has your process evolved?

AC: Seven years into my practice, I discovered the photobook as an opportunity to reconfigure the meaning of images themselves through design, sequencing, and pairings. The way we understand an image could change in book form when placed next to another image. It’s a way to have ever-more control over how to tell a story.

After a photobook is published do you ever go back and say, “I wish I had put this image here and that one there”?

AC: That’s a great question, because I have done that. For example, the Carpoolers photobook has morphed over five versions. The first was the most naive and the best I could do at that stage. Four years later there were other ideas I thought would make the project interesting, so I re-sequenced the book. Three years after that I wanted to show how the project could be seen as double-spread landscapes. The fourth and fifth versions invite people to see the mistakes and choices I made while creating the images. It shows my vulnerability as an artist and my disbelief in photographic truth. Sometimes trucks are there, sometimes there’s a blank street because I missed the photograph completely, which tells you it’s not about the decisive moment but about this phenomenon I witnessed coincidentally.

With the political changes in the US, what does this mean for your work and the topics you engage with?

AC: My work touches on political situations that happen not only in Mexico, but with our neighbor, the USA. In Mexico, corruption and instability of truth are the norm — things are yellow one day then black the next, and nobody can do anything about it because it’s part of the culture we live in. To see that happening within the North American context is not something that, from our side, we thought we would see happen. For many Latin Americans, the USA was a place we projected certainty to, a place of political morals, a place of dignified living, a place we saw as a land of opportunity. Now its politics feel like they’ve been Latin Americanized. The power struggles, tactics, and rhetoric are unfathomable. If you read into my images enough, you can see there are many coincidences.

How do you see the role of AI evolving in your practice?

AC: Exploring AI tools is the perfect continuation of my career. I want to be engaging with the idea of the archive to produce new gestures and questions about photographic images. My work uses pictures I’ve collected or created, but now I’m using this AI machine mind to reimagine new images from these old photos.

What you need are good ideas. Everybody has a camera, but that doesn’t make everybody a photographer. Similarly, everybody has access to AI, but not all images created with AI are sufficient to be considered art. AI puts a bomb in the art world by saying if a machine is capable of creating images that an artist with years of training can do, what does that mean for the artist? As a provocateur and somebody who’s excited about change, it’s a great moment to ask deeper questions about why we need photography in the age of AI.

How is the exhibition organized?

AC: It’s chronological. You see each phase of my practice: project photography that looked more internally than outwards. Then photobooks focused on the border and transportation. The last part is my work with archives, collages, cutouts, and AI images. It’s an eclectic ending that shows how my perspective towards photographic images and what they can do as an artistic medium is transforming.

A series called Masks, in the first room, is about how I see myself. It’s 13 self-portraits of the different names and nicknames I’ve been called. The exhibition ends with AI portraits of people and found photographs I’ve been collecting for years. So it starts with self-portraits of me trying to find an identity and finishes with the identity of others I’ve seen in photographs and how a machine understands identity through faces.

What would you like people to leave the exhibition understanding?

AC: I’d like visitors to leave sensing the arc of my practice — an ongoing oscillation between moments of conviction and moments of doubt as to who I am, what doing art means in the 21st century, and a glimpse at the context in which all of that plays out. Each project marks a point where I was either sure of my direction or wrestling with it, and together create a sort of map of how I see the world and how the world affects me.

At the same time, I hope the show serves as a doorway into contemporary Latin America. The works grow out of a place where things are always in flux — improvised, half-formed, resilient — and they carry that unfinished charge. In them, you’ll find a fragmentary self-portrait of my culture. If viewers walk away feeling that restless, fertile uncertainty, the exhibition has done its job.

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules is on view November 22, 2025, through April 19, 2026, on Floor 3.

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules is co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.

Major support of Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules at SFMOMA is provided by Kate and Wes Mitchell and the Pritzker Exhibition Fund in Photography.

Significant support is provided by The Black Dog Private Foundation, Jim Breyer, Concepción S. and Irwin Federman, Katie Hall and Tom Knutsen, and Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman.