Alejandro Cartagena, “Ground Rules”
SFMOMA, San Francisco
“Ground Rules,” Alejandro Cartagena’s SFMOMA mid-career retrospective, covers twenty years’ work by the prolific Mexican photographer and book artist. Cartagena’s vast oeuvre of twenty-seven separate series belies his relative youth — he’s not yet fifty — and the variety of his work, exploring sociopolitical concerns and aesthetic impact. Not all of Cartagena’s projects are represented, even in this large selection; the well-illustrated catalogue is more comprehensive.
The exhibition’s title derives from baseball, as SFMOMA Assistant Curator of Photography Shana Lopes notes in her catalogue essay. Cartagena’s boyhood baseball games in the Dominican Republic required agreements by the players on the irregular, ad-hoc playing fields available to them. Lopes sees Cartagena’s variegated practice as similar: choose a subject and an approach, and then obey the self-imposed rules and structure.
For “Identidad Nueva Léon” (2005-6), Cartagena and Rubén Marcos photographed hundreds of people whom they encountered at random in shopping malls, churches, and plazas. The subjects are casually posed, and presented life-sized and at three-quarters length, exuding the gravitas of formal portraits. The white backgrounds may borrow from the neutral backdrops of Richard Avedon’s portraits, especially those of the American West. The idea of using tents, with their gently diffused lighting, as portable photographic studios harks back to Irving Penn, although Cartagena and Marcos probably hit upon the tent idea on their own out of practical necessity. A frieze of ten nuevoleoneses of various types — eight singles flanked by two couples — greets viewers near the show’s entrance.
“Suburbia Mexicana” (2005-10) comprises several small series of twelve to sixteen photos each. “Fragmented Cities” depicts the construction of affordable suburban housing with rows of minimalist cubical dwellings laid out in rows, as if extruded, recalling the “ticky-tacky little boxes” of Malvina Reynolds’ folk song about postwar hillside housing developments south of San Francisco, contrasting with the scenic backdrop of the Monterrey’s Sierra Madre Oriental foothills. “Urban Holes” shows the vacant lots of downtown Monterrey, the neglected public spaces between private properties, contrasting with the bustling economy, seen with the eye of an abstract painter. “Lost Rivers” presents traditional nature-photography views of the Santa Catarina River. For “People of Suburbia,” Cartagena photographed his neighbors and their neighborhoods in unassuming slices of daily life.
In “Construcciones” (2014), the artist posed for what might be termed cosplay selfies exploring the idea of identity as social construct, an approach if not invented, then at least exemplified by the photographer Cindy Sherman. In these thirteen self-portraits, identically composed, the artist poses, variously costumed, between a blackboard inscribed with various sardonic titles — mentiroso (liar), papapitufo (Papa Smurf), pendejo (stupid), pinto (painted), pinche pelon (damned bald man), guero (blond) — and a construction helmet. If we interpret the series allegorically, the props symbolize the seemingly antithetical realms of mental and physical work.
The iconic“Carpoolers” series (201-12) catapulted Cartagena to the attention of the art world (with an assist from The New York Times). The forty-two identically-framed shots of pickup truck beds, laden with construction laborers sprawled or standing amid their equipment and materials, headed to the new suburbs of south Monterrey, were taken from a Highway 85 freeway pedestrian overpass on Mondays,. Wednesdays, and Fridays, over the course of a year. The term “Carpoolers” has no Spanish equivalent, and is probably meant ironically anyway; it merges a humanist view of economic reality with traffic engineering terminology. All they will call you will be ‘carpoolers, to paraphrase Woody Guthrie’s 1948 protest song, “Deportee (Plane Crash at Los Gatos).”
The empirical-evidence aspect of Cartagena’s early work has in recent years been superseded by abstraction, conceptualism, and the investigation of new technology. Initially self-taught, but later influenced by the photographer-publishers Gerardo Montiel Klint and Paul Graham, the artist used artifice (as previously discussed in his “Construcciones” self-portraits) to venture beyond the single-moment, decisive-image straight photography embraced by photo purists.
Abstraction becomes more prominent in the silhouette photos of two woman glimpsed through a checkpoint gate grid in the “Invisible Line” series (2010-17), one of several bodies of work examining the Mexican-American border both physically and psychologically: build/finish the pixelated wall! One image of the borderland landscape is even bisected by a wooden wall, seen perpendicularly, a thin line of demarcation which the artist clearly got around. In several collage works from his “Photographic Structures” series (2019), Cartagena cut his old photos into small squares and reassembled them into puzzle pieces held in place by small circular disks or magnets. In “Grupos Recortadas,” the artist, who discovered his lifelong interest in archives and found images at an early job scanning historical photographs, resurrects anonymous black and white photos, but carefully excises the people, leaving documents of long-ago events with the participants seemingly erased by time. One large circular photo collage towards the end of the exhibition may serve as the artist’s minimalist valediction to representation: dozens of overlapping photos of the polluted black night sky are arranged into six concentric rings around a circular aperture, like the pupil of an eye or a camera lens, forming a shell or shield that evokes the hemispherical night sky bereft of constellations, mapped but featureless.
Following Cartagena’s realist early work as it evolved toward abstraction and conceptualism, I was reminded of Walker Evans’ 2017 retrospective at SFMOMA, tracing his early career in social documentary photos of 1930s Depression America (published in James Agee’s book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”), moving in later years into unexpected directions, into experimentation with color and Polaroid photography, both unorthodox art media at the time; covert candid photography of passengers in subway cars (with the camera peeping out from Evans’ buttoned-up overcoat, tripped by a cable release); and even painting. Cartagena’s evolution from realism to examining the nature of seeing and art making seems to echo Evans’ earlier journey.
The photography world has radically changed since Evans’ era, with the development of digital media and the online publication of millions of images every day; the internet is a true “museum without walls” far beyond what the French writer André Malraux imagined back in the late 1940s. Cartagena characterizes this continual rain of images as “trillions and trillions of photographs, an endless pit of visual garbage that no human will ever be able to see in their lifetime.” Despite his sardonic take on image glut, Cartagena sees the emergence of AI through a hopeful lens, as a powerful tool for excavating meaning from the media midden. Time and photographic archaeologists will tell.
