He lives in downtown Monterrey, and he cares deeply about its land, its people, and its future.

Ultimately Cartagena documents the chaos and destruction that result from scant or misguided urban planning. Cartagena’s critical eye is not focused on his subjects’ lifestyle choice, but rather on the political and commercial mechanisms that lured them to make it. The suburbanites are not depicted as vulnerable, nor are their portraits seeped in irony. He reveals the innovative ways in which they personalize their homes and sometimes start businesses in them in an effort to improve their lives. He photographs the empty lots left undeveloped in the city center and makes portraits of the people who live in the suburbs. Beyond simply documenting the destruction that these subdivisions reap on the natural environment, Cartagena explores less obvious parts of the story to tell a more complicated tale of change. Only the landscape appears capable of limiting their proliferation, the mountains and rivers the only forces able to contain their sprawl.Ĭartagena’s photographs of the housing developments extend a long tradition of photographers addressing the suburbs, but they take a unique approach. The homes are small, generally under 100 square meters (or less than 328 square feet), and usually occupied by four to six people. He takes pictures of dried-up river beds that attest to the water mis-allocation and depletion brought about by the construction, and he depicts perpetual rows of tiny houses slicing directly into the foothills of the picturesque mountains that surround Monterrey. Here is an excerpt from Karen Irvine‘s Introduction to the book Suburbia Mexicana:Ĭartagena captures both the destruction that rapid urbanization has imposed on the landscape and the phenomenon of densely packed housing. As he states: “The Mexican suburbs are symbolic they represent corruption, a lack of standards in planning, and personal obsessions.”Īnd it is through a sustained and wholistic visual study that Cartagena is able to convey something of the deeper mechanisms-the ideological, political, economic, social ground-at work, in his “man-altered landscapes.”Ĭartagena’s work equally diverges from earlier New Topographic approaches in that it does not simply reject beauty or seek to coolly “aestheticize the banal.” His images are aesthetically alluring and offer multiple points of resonance, reaching beyond the specific place represented and attesting to something more pervasive and palpable on a global level-greed, corruption, ecological fragility and loss-as shared issues under advanced capitalism. His subjects-tract housing, inner-city vacant lots, desiccated or polluted rivers, the residents of these new developments-figure prominently, yet beyond simple documentation Cartagena is interested in symbolically foregrounding the larger picture. It is an ambitious and committed project that seeks to tell, in multiple chapters, the complex story of the region’s rapid suburban expansion: from urban gentrification and inner-city ‘ghettoization,’ to the seemingly unplanned and unhampered suburban sprawl emanating from many of its fast growing cities, including the environmental consequences.Ĭartagena’s project both nods towards and distinguishes itself from the tradition of the New Topographers in interesting and significant ways. Suburbia Mexicana is a documentary project deeply rooted in the local and the particular, in the artist’s own experience living and working in the northern Mexican city of Monterrey.

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