Reminiscent of the New Topographics, the photographs of Cartagena and others captures a country in the midst of a geographic transformation.
Alejandro Cartagena, Rivers of Power #71, from the series Rivers of Power, 2010–16(© Alejandro Cartagena / Courtesy of the Artist)
Robert Adams’s photograph Adams County, Colorado, 1974 shows a line of nearly identical one-story homes running on a diagonal to the frame of the image. It hints at prefabricated newness: The homes, as evidenced by the irrigation canal and dirt road in the image’s bottom-right corner, have been constructed recently on former farmland. There are no cars passing by; a sense of loneliness and isolation pervades the photo.
Adams County is one of dozens of solemn black-and-white images that Adams made of the Denver suburbs between 1968 and 1974. Born in New Jersey in 1937, he moved as a teenager to Wheat Ridge, Colorado, a farming community in the process of suburbanization. Although he initially found it “desolate,” Adams soon learned the details of its natural beauty: “the coming of doves up from Mexico, the blooming of chicory…hundreds of wonderful things.” Coming of age in this place, he saw Denver’s suburban growth in its nascent form.
Adams left the area for college and graduate school in 1962. When he finally returned to become a literature professor at Colorado College, he found the state further transformed. Between the construction of Interstate 25, the Cold War–era defense spending that put more people in Denver on the federal payroll than in any city besides Washington, DC, and an oil boom, the region was in the midst of an unprecedented urban expansion. “I came back to Colorado to discover that…the places where I had worked, hunted, climbed and run rivers were all being destroyed,” he later recalled. “For me the desperate question was, how do I survive this?”
Adams turned to photography. He began making images of the new Denver suburbs in 1968 and soon dropped to part-time employment at the university to give himself more time for the work. As much as this was his search for a means of survival, it was also an effort to find new forms of beauty in a changing world. Inspired by the 19th-century cadastral-survey images of Timothy O’Sullivan, Adams conceived of his work in series; taking cues from the photographs of Dorothea Lange, he sought to identify the components of a new American vernacular. The anomie of his images, meanwhile, channeled the Edward Hopper paintings he had first seen at the Denver Art Museum as a teenager. The result was chilling—simultaneously a chronicle of the destruction of a stunning landscape and the aestheticization of its seemingly banal replacement.
Adams wasn’t the only one who came up with the idea to photograph the postwar suburban-housing boom, which the historian Adam Rome has called “one of the most profound environmental transformations in the nation’s history.” In 1975, Adams participated in a photography exhibition at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, that brought together the chroniclers of the country’s new built landscape—Lewis Baltz, Frank Gohlke, Nicholas Nixon, and others—and that christened their work the “New Topographics.” Though it was a “relatively modest exhibition” at the time, Robert Silberman wrote in 2011, it “looms ever larger in the history of photography.”
In 1990s Mexico, a similarly profound transformation took root in the country’s built environment. In 1917, the Mexican Constitution had enshrined the right to “dignified and decent housing.” The National Fund for Workers’ Housing, or INFONAVIT, had been created as the guarantor of this right. Throughout the ensuing decades, INFONAVIT and other state agencies constructed housing for formal-sector workers in the form of large apartment complexes called unidades habitacionales (habitational units). The buildings were integrated into the urban fabric; today, many of them remain desirable middle-class housing.
However, by the 1990s, the Mexican government had moved to reduce the state’s role in public life and the national economy through a series of privatizing measures. These neoliberal reforms allowed communally held, agricultural rural lands to be parceled and sold. Simultaneously, the work of INFONAVIT shifted to a privatized model: Real-estate developers, not the government, would now construct housing; the state agency would simply finance the mortgage, ensuring that the homebuilders had a steady stream of buyers. The result was a mushrooming of massive complexes of small, tightly packed row houses situated in urban peripheries across the country.
Journalistic investigations revealed that shoddy construction and predatory financing went hand in hand with the shift to the private sector. The Los Angeles Times published a five-part series claiming that Mexico’s “Levittown moment” had “devolved into a slow-motion social and financial catastrophe.” Yet like the rapid suburbanization of the United States decades earlier, the new developments also sparked a wave of photographic exploration. Since the early 2000s, a generation of photographers has developed a body of work that transposes and extends that of the New Topographics. One of these, Alejandro Cartagena, is the subject of a retrospective, “Ground Rules,” that is currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Just as the artists of the New Topographics movement largely hailed from the fast-growing American West, the Nuevos Topográficos like Cartagena, Jorge Taboada, and Livia Corona Benjamin have their roots in Mexico’s north, a region composed of open, arid landscapes that carries a similar cultural mythology. Cartagena was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to the northern Mexico city of Monterrey when he was 13 years old. (His mother is from Mexico and his father is Dominican.) This meant that, like Adams’s coming to Denver, he arrived at a place on the precipice of change: Monterrey has doubled in population since Cartagena’s migration there.
It’s this demographic and environmental change that the Mexican photographers have sought to capture. Another Monterrey-born photographer, Jorge Taboada, for instance, created a series of photographs of the developments titled Alta Densidad (High Density). The houses spill off the edges of the frame, their eerie geometry appearing to expand endlessly. Their bright colors and the white-gray of the newly paved streets around them become an abstract tessellation, closer to one of Agnes Martin’s painted grids than any genre of landscape photography.
In the series Two Million Homes for Mexico, meanwhile, the photographer Livia Corona Benjamin, originally from Baja California, allows her viewers a sliver of horizon. In one emblematic image, 47,547 Homes. Ixtapaluca, Mexico, the horizon line sits high in the frame, but its thin fringe is pastoral: the sweep of a wide, green valley and tall, gray mountains surrounded by clouds. Below, on what was once the valley floor, stretches a rough surface of orange—an expanse of rectangular rows splaying out between two boulevards.
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Though the small, identical orange homes spill off the left and right edges of the frame just as they do in Taboada’s images, the mountains in the distance place them in an earthly context. Meanwhile, the pink, red, and blue awnings of street vendors are visible at the bottom of the image, creating a ribbon through the scene whose slight chaos suggests that one day, the eerie order may become as variegated as any ordinary neighborhood.
Cartagena lowers the horizon line even further. Many of the filings of homes that appear in his 2005–10 series Suburbia Mexicana are built into the skirts of mountain ranges, their strings of white boxes contrasting with dramatic rock faces and green thornscrub. Those that lack geology make up for it with ample skies filled with enormous cumulus clouds. A subseries, Suburbia Mexicana: Lost Rivers, shows the waterways desiccated by the homes’ rapid construction—but with their rich vegetation and lush colors, they don’t immediately look like images of destruction.
As Cartagena illuminates the environment that holds these subdivisions, the existence of a seemingly impossible quotidian life also flickers into being. This is what distinguishes Cartagena’s work: He brings together landscape and portrait photography to capture the new ways of life that Mexico’s 21st-century suburbs have engendered. Where other suburban photography can let its balance of disdain and compassion fall on the side of the broken world, Cartagena is rooting equally or more for the homebuyer seeking a nest. This searing compassion is the denouement of the retrospective. Indeed, he has managed to depict not only the transformation of a landscape but the unforeseen life rhythms of the new suburbs and the millions of people for whom they have become normal.
“Ground Rules” opens with Identidad Nuevo León, a series of portraits taken in 2005–06 by Cartagena in collaboration with Rubén Marcos. The two photographers spent months traversing the state in the north of Mexico, setting up a white background wherever they thought passersby might be willing to pose. As curator Shana Lopes points out in her catalog essay, the two men took their cues from Richard Avedon’s 1985 In the American West, a series of 124 portraits—also placed uniformly against a white background—taken at the region’s “rodeos, mining camps, cattle ranches, and slaughterhouses.” But among Cartagena and Marcos’s nuevoleonenses, there are as many school uniforms, Disney prints, and black-clad goths as there are cowboy getups: Cartagena saw the series as proof that, despite the state’s cowboy reputation, there was no single Nuevo León identity.
When the exhibition turns to landscape, it looks to the US-Mexican border, seeking to capture the essence of the line from a variety of different approaches. One series, Border Camera, consists of screenshots that Cartagena took from a US National Parks Service webcam pointed at Mexico. Between Borders documents rural life in an ejido, or ranching community, at Mexico’s very northern limit. An Invisible Line captures the US-Mexican border wall as it delineates the division between California, in the United States, and Baja California, in Mexico.
Some of these border images feel unremarkable in the context of the abundant artistic production that the United States’ enforcement infrastructure has provoked, including long-term projects by photographers like Richard Misrach, David Taylor, and Miguel Fernández de Castro. But in the following room, these bifurcated forays into portraiture and landscape come together with an incisive tenderness.
Flanking the striking images of Suburbia Mexicana are photographs that capture the daily routines of the working-class people who inhabit the series’ exurban developments. One portrait, taken through the window of one of the minibuses that serve the far-flung suburbs, depicts a woman who walks her husband to the bus stop every morning; another, also taken from within a bus—the backs of heads crowding the frame—follows the tired eyes of a woman as she boards and searches fruitlessly for a seat. The effect of these Mexican cities’ rapid, privatized sprawl—in contrast to the state agency’s earlier model of condominium towers—is that the homeowners spend hours in traffic, crammed into the few buses that serve the extreme periphery, going to and from the places where they make their living.
This leads to Carpoolers, Cartagena’s pièce de résistance. Over the course of a year, he stood on a pedestrian bridge above a four-lane highway and photographed the men traveling to work in the backs of trucks. Like the topographical surveys and the work of the New Topographics, Carpoolers is most powerful when seen in sequence. At SFMOMA, its images are mounted in a grid that occupies an entire gallery wall. Some trucks and men appear multiple times—“I learned that the city needs repetition,” Cartagena told me. Some read a newspaper, while others pick their teeth. They try to make themselves comfortable while surrounded by ropes, shovels, cabinet doors, and extension cords. Many attempt to sleep; some see Cartagena’s camera above them and smile.
Search Carpoolers on Instagram and you’ll see that the series has gone viral more than once. Set to music and sometimes accompanied by a text overlay explaining the project, the reels offer another way to experience the power of this work in sequence—one that is accessible to the very individuals that Cartagena depicts: commuters packed into buses hoping to make the time pass more quickly; women who stay behind in the developments during their husbands’ workdays; and children growing up as the descendants of Mexico’s new rural-to-suburban and urban-to-exurban migrations trying to make sense of their lives.
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This kind of egalitarian circulation of images has helped photographers from the periphery to build careers in the opposite direction: developing platforms on Instagram and jumping from there to gallery representation. One such artist is Sonia Madrigal of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, a city adjacent to Mexico City that was settled, largely informally, in the middle of the 20th century and has been dubbed “the largest slum in the world.” Sharing the spirit of Carpoolers, Madrigal’s photographs take place inside buses and on the edges of highways. Her series Tiempos Muertos (Dead Times), for instance, includes an image of a woman napping in the concrete alcove of a metro station and another of a man with his face painted as a clown—likely headed to perform for tips at a busy intersection—resting his head against the metal wall of the bus, the city passing behind him.
As these artists take up the mantle of the Nuevos Topográficos, Cartagena has shifted his focus to studying the circulatory pathways of the images themselves. The most recent works in “Ground Rules” come from his series Accumulations (2018) and We Are Things (2020). Both use elements of collage to draw attention to the way that photographic tropes move across time and place—something evident to anyone on social media who spends time seeing dozens, if not hundreds, of images per day. Take out the faces, as Cartagena does, and they become effectively indistinguishable.
While Cartagena investigates the proliferation of images made possible by the Internet and social media, he avoids the impulse to fatalistically bemoan the changes to art and photography they foretell. Instead, he offers an opening for their propagation to continue. For the SFMOMA retrospective, he developed an AI algorithm in collaboration with the Montreal-based technologist Hughes Bruyère that allows visitors to feed in sheets of colored paper and watch as it builds housing developments based on the typologies found in Suburbia Mexicana. Cartagena has made it clear that he is leaning into change—an approach that is perhaps the one most loyal to the people who are the subjects of his work.
Caroline TraceyTwitterCaroline Tracey is the author of Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History (W.W. Norton, 2026). She lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she works as a reporter for the Border Chronicle.