Alejandro Cartagena discusses 5 images from his new book.
Alejandro Cartagena, author of A Guide to Infrastructure and Corruption, tells us the story behind five of his favourite images from the project.
01 Untitled
This area is near the neighborhood I group up in in Monterrey. I would skate these streets to get to a friends house and to get tortillas for the house. This part of town was one of the first suburbs back in the 1970´s. My uncle and grandfather basically built the house in the “middle of nowhere” back then. 40 years later when I took this image, Cumbres, the name of this suburb, had grown from 2 sectors to more than 20 sections and out of the city limits of Monterrey and into the neighboring city of Garcia.
These under and over passes were built to loosen the flow of the people getting to the new areas of the suburb. It took me two days to get this frame just right. On the first day the light didn’t fall as I planned, so I went back around 6am the next morning with my 4x5 camera and waited for about two hours to get the frame. I usually don’t do that, getting more than a single frame for a site but this place had a personal attachment and so I really wanted to get a great shot. Obsessions of a photographer I guess!
02 Untitled
This image is a very Stephen Shore image to me. I really love the idea of the disorder of the Latin American cities. It is a reflection of our “third worldness” disorder. Looking at sites like these all the time I found great pleasure in trying to find order in this chaos. So for this shot I brought my 4x5 camera and “danced” around the site for some time until I found an internal order between the vertical and horizontal lines and the buildings from the surrounding area. I was also interested in showing how the new eats up what was there before, i.e. the buildings, advertisements, roads and parking lots.
The new infrastructure doesn’t care for anyone but itself. I followed many of these construction sites and saw how business owners would denounce the government to get some sort of tax break while the construction was going on as many of the customers prefer to stay away from the dirt and traffic mess. Many never get a break and end up closing.
03 Untitled
Pedestrian overpasses are being built all over the metropolitan areas of Mexican cities. I see them as “an apology for giving the car the right of passage” message from the government to its citizens. Many are built in places where they should not be built, creating real urban sculptures. Under our new metropolitan transit law, if a pedestrian is run over by a car on a street with a pedestrian overpass near by, they are now to be found guilty of the accident. The car is the master and it seems in return we get these strange metal prizes that are extremely long and unattractive to walk up and through, especially on 40ºc plus days.
04 Untitled
After a few years of working on the project I got suspicious of just documenting these structures as they are. I always had in my mind the idea of the history of photography and the ways in which the urban landscape has been represented and written about. I love the way Charles Marville captured subtle urban transformations of Paris, for example. There is a power in infrastructure. Power imposes things on those without power. Sure the Governors and Mayors take the photo in front of these structures and present them as an opportunity for the city-state to progress, yes yes, but what about the people who suddenly had to live with these concrete dinosaurs daily (I was one of them).
I got curious and started to scout houses and apartment buildings that had had a bridge built in front of their ¨view¨. I photographed in Mexico City and the people were not happy with this imposition. No public consensus, no tax cut, no help to clean, first the dirt of the construction and then the smog that piles up; layers and layers of grey dirt that never leaves. Their view is a permanent view of “progress”.
05 Untitled
This was one of the first images I took of the project and it has that thing of saying exactly what I wanted it to represent; the new infrastructure needs to be built and nothing will stand in its way. No house, business or group of people. It cuts through the landscape and urbanscape to impose its progress.
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Alejandro Cartagena lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban and environmental issues. His work has been exhibited internationally and in the collections of several museums including the SFMOMA, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Portland Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio, Brazil, the Photo Library of Nuevo Leon, Mexico and the National Photo Library in Pachuca, Mexico.