Ground Rules. Alejandro Cartagena

Madrid, Spain

A city expands. A border hardens. A worker rides in the back of a truck. Alejandro Cartagena shows how everyday landscapes reveal the rules of power.

Photo Alejandro Cartagena Between Borders

Image credit

Alejandro Cartagena Between Borders #81, de la serie Between Borders [Entre fronteras], 2009-2010. © Alejandro Cartagena

Meet the artist

Alejandro Cartagena

ArtLovers Tip

After seeing the exhibition, look at your own city differently. Notice the routes people take to work, the housing developments at the edges, the roads, the construction zones, the invisible labour behind daily life. Cartagena’s power is that he makes the “ordinary” landscape confess the rules it was built on.

Exhibition Highlights - What you’ll see

Contemporary documentary photography, social landscape, urban photography, serial photography, and critical visual research.

Cartagena’s work challenges the traditional idea of the “decisive moment” in photography. Instead of relying on one perfect image, he builds meaning through series, repetition, and multiple points of view.

Ground Rules surveys more than two decades of work by Mexican-Dominican photographer Alejandro Cartagena, bringing together key projects that help explain his career.

You’re watching:

  • Suburbia Mexicana — urban growth, housing, and fragmented cityscapes
  • Carpoolers — workers seen from above, commuting in the back of pickup trucks
  • Projects focused on the United States–Mexico border
  • Images of migration, housing, landscape transformation, and social structures
  • Photography that works less like a single “iconic shot” and more like a visual constellation

The result is critical but deeply human. Cartagena doesn’t show territory as background — he shows it as evidence: of labour, inequality, displacement, expansion, and survival.

Worth the trip

Yes — especially if you care about photography, cities, migration, and how landscapes reveal social systems.

Because Ground Rules makes visible the forces we often normalize: who gets to live where, who moves through the city, who builds it, who crosses borders, and who is pushed to the margins.

It matters because Cartagena refuses simplified narratives. His work asks us to look at contemporary challenges — migration, housing, border politics, environmental pressure, urban transformation — from multiple perspectives instead of one fixed story.

How to experience it

Don’t search for “the one best photograph” — follow the series.

Look for repetition: cars, houses, workers, borders, roads, empty land.

Ask what each landscape is hiding: labour, policy, inequality, extraction, aspiration.

Pay attention to distance and viewpoint, especially in Carpoolers.

Read the images as systems, not isolated moments.

Madrid, Spain

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