A photographer who gave up pictures

Alejandro Cartagena hasn’t picked up a digital camera in six years, he advised a barely baffled viewers gathered for the opening of his pictures exhibit, “Ground Rules,” on show on the SFMOMA till April 19. 

Instead, the Dominican Republic-born Mexican photographer continued, he’s turned his consideration in the direction of a brand new artwork from: AI. At this information, some sitting within the viewers visibly shuddered. 

In the early 2000s, Cartagena started documenting the on a regular basis dramas surrounding his household dwelling in Juarez — what on the time was a small border city. When he picked up his digital camera and commenced documenting the world round him, AI was in its infancy, and social media, inciting a proliferation of iPhone photographers, was restricted to MySpace. 

Shortly earlier than Cartagena moved together with his household to Mexico, the Mexican authorities launched into an formidable plan to construct tons of of housing developments throughout the nation. These new suburbs have been meant to be inexpensive to Mexico’s working class, however in the end saddled new owners with properties they couldn’t afford to take care of, and couldn’t do away with both. 

Every yr, their loans obtained greater, and their high quality of life declined. Beneath the floor of seemingly pristine cookie-cutter properties, poor building yielded properties that might burst into flames, many had no operating water, and homes shortly fell into disrepair. 

In Cartagena’s early photographs of Juarez, idyllic portraits of households pose in opposition to a backdrop of sprawling, almost an identical, cube-shaped properties. But over time, his later work depicts Mexico’s burgeoning change. 

Over the following decade, Juarez grows quickly from a city of 60,000 individuals to a booming metropolis of over half 1,000,000 individuals — and town’s infrastructure struggles to maintain up. The as soon as pristine properties start to show indicators of turmoil. In one collection of photographs and stills from information footage, rows of homes are razed to the bottom by a hurricane. In one other, a house is subsumed in vines. Some photographs present nothing however a pile of ash after defective electrical wiring triggered properties to burst into flames. 

For Cartagena, choosing up the digital camera started as a technique to perceive his dwelling, and the adjustments he noticed taking place earlier than his eyes. 

His photographs of the rising metropolis are interlaced with on a regular basis portraits — employees piled into the again of a truck mattress, a household sitting at their kitchen desk, a baby of their bed room. He performs with gentle in a method that makes scenes of a border wall, or weary vacationers on a crowded bus on an hours-long commute, lovely. 

But for Cartagena, that magnificence started to really feel dishonest. In 2016, he abruptly stopped documentary pictures altogether. “I felt like I was romanticizing northern Mexico,” he defined.

Instead, he started to chop up and manipulate his earlier photographs. 

In one set up, “Latent Space,” (2025) Cartagena feeds six photographs of suburban properties constructed throughout Mexico’s housing program into an AI mannequin. A participant, taking building paper and shifting the papers beneath a digital camera, generates a picture of a brand new dwelling, mirrored on a big display screen. The photographs are just like the six photographs of the properties Cartagena took years in the past — with some eerily stunning twists. Images of people that Cartagena have by no means photographed earlier than have emerged, standing in entrance of their new dwelling, and writing has magically appeared on its partitions. 

For Cartagena, AI manipulations like this assist him additional perceive the world round him. 

“There’s a debris of photography,” stated Cartagena. “Everyone has a photographic practice.” With so many photographs already in existence, Cartagena is, as he put it, “Interested in what the machine can see.” 

In one other set up, “Suburban Bus,” Cartagena fed 3,600 photographs he took of individuals going about their each day commute in Juarez into an algorithm that learn the time-stamp of every picture and sequenced them into chronological order. The last product is a colossal flooring to ceiling mural of 1000’s of tiny photographs of commuters crowded collectively for hours, searching at scenes of the city avenue outdoors because the solar started to set. 

He’s weaved in his personal, up to date work with photographs from strangers — stills from broadcast information, newspaper clips, household photographs he’s bought at flea markets — typically with the assistance of know-how. He sees this as a brand new artform — an enchancment on the documentary pictures that he as soon as liked. 

During the Q&A interval, some within the viewers pushed again. One intrepid viewers member requested if Cartagena, like Andy Warhol, needed to “be a machine?” Cartagena laughed, “I am not a machine. Perhaps I’m a bit obsessive though.” But, he continued, “What is the point of art if a machine can do something that looks like art?”