The Photography of Alejandro Cartagena · SFMOMA

How do you see the position of AI evolving in your follow?

AC: Exploring AI instruments is the proper continuation of my profession. I wish to be partaking with the thought of the archive to provide new gestures and questions on photographic pictures. My work makes use of photos I’ve collected or created, however now I’m utilizing this AI machine thoughts to reimagine new pictures from these previous pictures.

What you want are good concepts. Everybody has a digital camera, however that doesn’t make everyone a photographer. Similarly, everyone has entry to AI, however not all pictures created with AI are adequate to be thought of artwork. AI places a bomb within the artwork world by saying if a machine is able to creating pictures that an artist with years of coaching can do, what does that imply for the artist? As a provocateur and any person who’s enthusiastic about change, it’s an awesome second to ask deeper questions on why we want images within the age of AI.

How is the exhibition organized?

AC: It’s chronological. You see every part of my follow: undertaking images that seemed extra internally than outwards. Then photobooks centered on the border and transportation. The final half is my work with archives, collages, cutouts, and AI pictures. It’s an eclectic ending that reveals how my perspective in direction of photographic pictures and what they’ll do as an inventive medium is reworking.

A sequence known as Masks, within the first room, is about how I see myself. It’s 13 self-portraits of the completely different names and nicknames I’ve been known as. The exhibition ends with AI portraits of individuals and located images I’ve been amassing for years. So it begins with self-portraits of me looking for an id and finishes with the id of others I’ve seen in images and the way a machine understands id by way of faces.

What would you want individuals to depart the exhibition understanding?

AC: I’d like guests to depart sensing the arc of my follow — an ongoing oscillation between moments of conviction and moments of doubt as to who I’m, what doing artwork means within the twenty first century, and a glimpse on the context by which all of that performs out. Each undertaking marks a degree the place I used to be both positive of my course or wrestling with it, and collectively create a type of map of how I see the world and the way the world impacts me.

At the identical time, I hope the present serves as a doorway into up to date Latin America. The works develop out of a spot the place issues are at all times in flux — improvised, half-formed, resilient — they usually carry that unfinished cost. In them, you’ll discover a fragmentary self-portrait of my tradition. If viewers stroll away feeling that stressed, fertile uncertainty, the exhibition has achieved its job.

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules is on view November 22, 2025, by way of April 19, 2026, on Floor 3.

Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules is co-organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.

Major help of Alejandro Cartagena: Ground Rules at SFMOMA is offered by Kate and Wes Mitchell and the Pritzker Exhibition Fund in Photography.

Significant help is offered by The Black Dog Private Foundation, Jim Breyer, Concepción S. and Irwin Federman, Katie Hall and Tom Knutsen, and Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman.