Alejandro Cartagena (Mexican, b. 1977) is a documentary photographer born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, who moved to Monterrey, Mexico, at age thirteen and has built his practice on serial bodies of work examining housing, labor, and urban sprawl.,,Suburbia Mexicana (2005–2010), a study of how politics and corruption shaped affordable housing developments around Monterrey, brought him international recognition.
For his Carpoolers series (2014), shot from a freeway overpass in 2011, he photographed Mexican construction workers riding to work in the open beds of pickup trucks along Federal Highway 85, which links Monterrey's center to its suburbs.,In Photographic Structures (2019–2020) he salvaged discarded vernacular photographs from landfills outside Mexico City and cut and rearranged their figures into altered collage prints.His 2020 photobook A Small Guide to Homeownership resamples material from earlier series in the format of a “For Dummies” guide to examine the economics of buying a house in Mexico, and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize.,
His work is held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago.,In 2021 he co-founded Fellowship with Fred Arnal, a platform for photography-focused NFT drops that later expanded to digital art more broadly and opened a physical showroom in London.
His 2025 monograph Ground Rules, published by Aperture, accompanied a retrospective of more than twenty photographic series at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curated by Shana Lopes.In 2026 he reworked the project as Carpoolers Arcade Game, a playable video game he described as letting the photographs “stop being only something you look at and become something you move through”.
