Alejandro Cartagena Photographs At San Francisco Museum Of Modern Art

Alejandro Cartagena, 'Fragmented Cities, Escobedo,' from the series 'Suburbia Mexicana, 2005–10; © Alejandro Cartagena.

This post was originally published on Forbes.

Alejandro Cartagena’s Carpoolers series strikingly reveals a way of life, a failed economic system, and a screwed up social hierarchy in an instant. The power of photography to communicate and lay bare complex realities in a single image. Pictures for which the old “a picture is worth a thousand words” saying was created.

Commissioned with the mundane task of photographing how people used cars in Monterrey, Mexico, Cartagena took to highway pedestrian overpasses and then looked down. Three mornings a week for a year, he looked down. Most remarkable to him were the laborers who, without access to a direct bus line, huddled in pickup truck beds for the commute from their homes in the suburbs to wealthier enclaves.

“My grandfather was a construction worker,” Cartagena (b. 1977) told Forbes.com. “I see (the workers) and I think of my family and our relationship to construction and day laboring. It's part of how I grew up.”

Carpoolers series photographs features in “Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules,” the artist’s first retrospective, on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through April 19, 2026.

Shot between 2011 and 2012 when Cartagena was out of school, out of work, and down on his luck, Carpoolers has gone on to achieve worldwide acclaim, becoming one of the most important photographic series of the 21st century. A slice of life in Monterrey relatable across continents and cultures.

“The lack of context in which the images are taken, you don't see the landscape, you don't see signage, you just see trucks and men, and so that could be anywhere in the world,” Cartagena explained. “I've had people from the US, from Europe, from Latin America tell me their stories, ‘I remember that I used to do that when I was a kid,’ or, ‘I remember that was the start of my business, I was one of those day laborers, and then I became the maestro,’ or the head of the of a group of workers.”

Alejandro Cartagena, 'Carpoolers #21,' from the series Carpoolers, 2011–12; © Alejandro Cartagena.

Cartagena was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and has lived in Mexico since age 13. All of his pictures are from Mexico. All of his pictures are universal.

“I'm not telling the personal story of the people that are in my images. I'm trying to tell a very subjective story of how I see the world, and the world I live in is here in Mexico, and the people I live with are Mexicans, but the openness with which I practice photography permits anybody to come and see the people as their family members, as their friends,” Cartagena said. “My images are not telling the truth. They are not reporting this is what's happening and these are the people, and these are their names. It's about here is somebody who lives in a place–me–and there are things that affect my life, there are things that relate to my family, to my living conditions, and I want to talk about those things.”

Beyond commuting to work sites in pickup truck beds, the “things” of contemporary life in Mexico Cartagena chooses to photograph include the U.S.-Mexico border, climate change, increasing wealth disparities and the effects of rapid suburban sprawl. “Ground Rules” presents examples from all of Cartagena’s series together for the first time.

Alejandro Cartagena Artificial Intelligence Artworks

Cartagena strives to participate in the history of how photography transforms human understanding through images. Increasingly, that has led him to producing Artificial Intelligence-generated works.

“Photography is the most important visual medium of the last 200 years, and as such, it has affected art in general and other mediums. We have video because of photography. Painting absolutely changed because of photography. As a photographic researcher, not only an artist, I’m thinking how is this medium affecting the life that we live and the tools that we're using today, and AI has been one of the tools that has benefited from photograph medium,” Cartagena said. “It's a natural progression that I'm going to start using a medium that is dependent on photographs to explore new ways of thinking of image making in the 21st Century.”

Artificial Intelligence is a savior to some, a villain to just as many.

Its powers are essential to an ever more suffocating surveillance state. Powers being unleashed on unknowing everyday American citizens. Powers wielded by anti-democratic forces in America and abroad.

It has already resulted in thousands of job losses in the U.S. alone. The tip of the iceberg. Ford’s CEO said AI will, “replace literally half of all white-collar workers.”

Within the arts community, a great backlash has arisen over copyright infringement, the theft of intellectual property, and AI scraping the internet for individuals’ artistic creations to fuel its output without compensation or credit.

Cartagena has heard all of this and remains steadfast in support of the technology.

“When infringement happens, when somebody purposely takes somebody else's work and claims it's theirs, AI artists and people using AI to create art, they are not doing that. They are thinking, ‘How do I make my own work,’” Cartagena said. “Yes, (AI is) trained on things that came before, but that's how art works. I don't exist in a bubble. I look at what came before me and I get inspired by that and then I produce my own work. If I look at what's in the past and I copy paste it and claim that's mine, well, then you have a copyright issue.”

Fair.

And if only responsible artists were using the technology to create images, there might not be a problem.

But what about “deep fakes” and AI’s powers being used to create non-consensual pornography from yearbook photos and pictures taken on the street? Cartagena, of course, doesn’t support that application of the technology, and says this genie came out of the bottle before AI was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.

“AI, again, is the poster child for the idea of deep fakes and the mimicking of somebody else's likeness. This has been going on for the past 10 to 15 years,” Cartagena said. “One could say that Photoshop is the emergence of the idea of this problem of things that look like something else and aren't real.”

Point taken.

Even before Photoshop, as far back as 1982, “National Geographic” landed in hot water for digitally manipulating a cover image of the Great Pyramids.

“It's not an AI problem, it's a digital image culture problem. It's something that has been there lurking, and now AI has taken it to another level,” Cartagena continued. “It's a problem that have we as a society, that we are somewhat image illiterate. We don't understand images. We don't have the time to ponder on, ‘What is this that I'm looking at?’ Is that AI’s fault? Is that the internet's fault? Is that digital photography's fault? It's all of the above; every one of those tools has contributed to our society that is overwhelmed by images.”

When asked about AI’s devastating toll on the environment and how America’s proliferation of data centers necessary to power the computations required by generative AI are exhausting water sources and keeping coal fired power plants in business, Cartagena is quick to point out those data centers aren’t only used for AI, they also power YouTube and Instagram, and any number of other tech-intensive services.

True enough.

The one aspect of AI’s proliferation that Cartagena does find concerning is how it’s being used by corporations to entrench systems of power, bending the will of governments away from democracy and into their direction, using it to further manipulate human behavior.

“I'm very concerned about that, but is this new? No. This has been happening for the past 10 to 15, years. We used to not call it AI, but it was there. It was called machine learning. These are tools that have been in place to help systems control us,” Cartagena said. “Why are we such an addicted culture to our phones? That has to do with AI, but we didn't call it AI. We are tethered to these algorithms that make us stick to our phones, to social media platforms. It's evil, but it's been evil for a long time. The people who understand how these systems work have been working in the dark, controlling us, and making the everyday things that we do weaponized in order to make us tools for their benefits.”

Artificial intelligence is a tool. Same as a hammer, same as a rifle, same as a camera. All tools can be used productively and destructively. What’s becoming clearer every day, however, is that there has never been a tool as powerful and pervasive as Artificial Intelligence.

How that technology is deployed, as a benefit or a detriment, will be made by tech oligarchs and governments, not artists, unfortunately.

About Chadd Scott

A midlife career crisis at 40 led Chadd Scott to begin writing about art with no background in it following a 20 year career in the sports media. Learning "Art History 101" from YouTube videos, used books, and podcasts, Scott found the more he looked, the more he liked. He now freelances for Forbes.com, Western Art Collector magazine, Native American Art magazine, and Fodors.com among other publications while operating his own website, www.seegreatart.art, a daily look at art exhibitions and events across the United States. Scott's particular interests in the art world are Native American, African American, and female artists and how art intersects with social justice. As he likes to say, "a people's history is best learned through their artwork." Scott especially enjoys traveling to off-the-beaten-path arts destinations across America. His favorite artist is Earl Biss. His favorite arts destination is Santa Fe, NM. Scott lives in Fernandina Beach, FL.