Alejandro Cartagena. Main research Phototgrapher.
Alejandro Cartagena was born in 1977 in the Dominican Republic and now lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico where many of his projects are based. He is a social documentary photographer who has focused most of his life’s works on examining social, urban and environmental issues mainly in Mexico but also around the world.
He is a highly awarded photographer and has received the photolucida critical mass book award, the lente latino award in Chile, the premio salon de la fotografia from the fototeca de nuevo leon and the premio iila-fotografia 2012 award in Rome. He has been named a foam magazine talent and one of pdn 30 emerging photographers in 2010. He has also been a finalist for the aperture portfolio award and has been nominated for the Santa fe photography prize, the prix pictet prize, the photoespaña descubrimientos award and the foam Paul Huff award. Aside this from his work has been published internationally by numerous magazines from the guardian to the New York Times lens blog.
Through Cartagena’s work we play witness to his interpretation of suburban Mexico and how many of the modern worlds problems have affected the people and places that he documents. This is shown through a number of works documenting single issues such as Portraits of Absence which is a very scaled down look at the huge and growing problem of the drug trade in Mexico through the affects it has had upon some of the classmates of Lucila Quintanilla a boy who was shot dead as an innocent bystander to drug related violence. Other projects and this issues raised in them have been on the topics of bureaucracy, the difficulties of living on a border with the USA and General problems in modern Mexican society.
I have chosen to research Cartagena because his work is almost the epitome of what social documentary photography is; a view of specific problems in society with an obvious agenda for change. He uses a mix in styles of photography through his work sometimes focusing on one specific style such as portraiture but generally mixing methods to provide an immersive experience for the viewer, getting his view and voicing the problems of Mexico in the best way possible.
Cartagena’s work and his style of photography will Impact heavily on my photography throughout this course and the similar choice of how politics and modern issues have effected communities will see even greater influence been taken from Cartagena in my project Dead Space.
