{"id":416313,"date":"2025-12-01T02:27:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T02:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/416313\/"},"modified":"2025-12-01T02:27:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T02:27:16","slug":"a-photographer-who-gave-up-photography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/416313\/","title":{"rendered":"A photographer who gave up photography"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alejandro Cartagena hasn\u2019t picked up a camera in six years, he told a slightly baffled audience gathered for the opening of his photography exhibit, \u201cGround Rules,\u201d on display at the SFMOMA until April 19.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Instead, the Dominican Republic-born Mexican photographer continued, he\u2019s turned his attention towards a new art from: AI. At this news, some sitting in the audience visibly shuddered.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the early 2000s, Cartagena began documenting the everyday dramas surrounding his family home in Juarez \u2014\u00a0what at the time was a small border town. When he picked up his camera and began documenting the world around him, AI was in its infancy, and social media, inciting a proliferation of iPhone photographers, was limited to MySpace.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Shortly before Cartagena moved with his family to Mexico, the Mexican government embarked on an ambitious plan to build hundreds of housing developments across the country. These new suburbs were meant to be affordable to Mexico\u2019s working class, but ultimately saddled new homeowners with properties they couldn\u2019t afford to care for, and couldn\u2019t get rid of either.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Every year, their loans got bigger, and their quality of life declined. Beneath the surface of seemingly pristine cookie-cutter homes, poor construction yielded homes that would burst into flames, many had no running water, and houses quickly fell into disrepair.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Cartagena\u2019s early photos of Juarez, idyllic portraits of families pose against a backdrop of sprawling, nearly identical, cube-shaped homes. But over the years, his later work depicts Mexico\u2019s burgeoning change.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Over the next decade, Juarez grows rapidly from a town of 60,000 people to a booming metropolis of over half a million people \u2014\u00a0and the city\u2019s infrastructure struggles to keep up. The once pristine homes begin to display signs of turmoil. In one series of photos and stills from news footage, rows of houses are razed to the ground by a hurricane. In another, a home is subsumed in vines. Some photos show nothing but a pile of ash after faulty electrical wiring caused homes to burst into flames.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Cartagena, picking up the camera began as a way to understand his home, and the changes he saw happening before his eyes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AAlejandro Cartagena, Rivers of Power #71, from the series Rivers of Power, 2010\u201316\u00a9 Alejandro Cartagena, courtesy the artist<\/p>\n

His photos of the growing city are interlaced with everyday portraits \u2014 workers piled into the back of a truck bed, a family sitting at their kitchen table, a child in their bedroom. He plays with light in a way that makes scenes of a border wall, or weary travelers on a crowded bus on an hours-long commute, beautiful.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But for Cartagena, that beauty began to feel dishonest. In 2016, he abruptly stopped documentary photography altogether. \u201cI felt like I was romanticizing northern Mexico,\u201d he explained. <\/p>\n

Instead, he began to cut up and manipulate his earlier images.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In one installation, \u201cLatent Space,\u201d (2025) Cartagena feeds six images of suburban homes built during Mexico\u2019s housing program into an AI model. A participant, taking construction paper and moving the papers under a camera, generates an image of a new home, reflected on a large screen. The images are similar to the six photos of the homes Cartagena took years ago \u2014\u00a0with some eerily surprising twists. Images of people who Cartagena have never photographed before have emerged, standing in front of their new home, and writing has magically appeared on its walls.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Cartagena, AI manipulations like this help him further understand the world around him.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a debris of photography,\u201d said Cartagena. \u201cEveryone has a photographic practice.\u201d With so many photos already in existence, Cartagena is, as he put it, \u201cInterested in what the machine can see.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In another installation, \u201cSuburban Bus,\u201d Cartagena fed 3,600 images he took of people going about their daily commute in Juarez into an algorithm that read the time-stamp of each image and sequenced them into chronological order. The final product is a colossal floor to ceiling mural of thousands of tiny images of commuters crowded together for hours, looking out at scenes of the urban street outside as the sun began to set.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AAlejandro Cartagena, Suburban Bus #56, from the series Suburban Bus, 2016; \u00a9 Alejandro Cartagena, courtesy the artist<\/p>\n

He\u2019s weaved in his own, updated work with images from strangers \u2014\u00a0stills from broadcast news, newspaper clips, family photos he\u2019s purchased at flea markets \u2014\u00a0often with the help of technology. He sees this as a new artform \u2014 an improvement on the documentary photography that he once loved.\u00a0<\/p>\n

During the Q&A period, some in the audience pushed back. One intrepid audience member asked if Cartagena, like Andy Warhol, wanted to \u201cbe a machine?\u201d Cartagena laughed, \u201cI am not a machine. Perhaps I\u2019m a bit obsessive though.\u201d But, he continued, \u201cWhat is the point of art if a machine can do something that looks like art?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alejandro Cartagena hasn\u2019t picked up a camera in six years, he told a slightly baffled audience gathered for…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":416314,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,1033,171,8160,3092,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-416313","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-museums","13":"tag-photography","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115641952136948638","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416313"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416313\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/416314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}