Continuing through April 19, 2026

“Ground Rules,” Alejandro Cartagena’s mid-career retrospective, covers twenty years’ work by the prolific Mexican photographer and book artist. Cartagena’s vast oeuvre of twenty-seven separate series belies his relative youth — he’s not yet fifty — and the variety of his work. In tracing the evolution of his aesthetic and social concerns, we can see that he marries visual accessibility with sociopolitical subtexts. Not all of Cartagena’s projects are represented; the well-illustrated catalogue is more comprehensive. 

The exhibition’s title derives from baseball, as SFMOMA Assistant Curator of Photography Shana Lopes notes in her catalog essay. Cartagena’s boyhood baseball games in the Dominican Republic required agreements by the players on the irregular, ad-hoc playing fields available to them. Lopes sees Cartagena’s variegated practice as similar: choose a subject and an approach, and then obey the self-imposed rules and structure.

For “Identidad Nueva Léon” (2005-6), Cartagena and Rubén Marcos photographed hundreds of people whom they encountered at random in shopping malls, churches, and plazas. The subjects are casually posed, life-sized and at three-quarters length, and exuding the gravitas of formal portraits. The white backgrounds borrow from the neutral backdrops of Richard Avedon’s portraits of Americans. The idea of using tents, with their gently diffused lighting, as portable photographic studios harks back to Irving Penn, although Cartagena and Marcos hit upon the tent idea on their own. A frieze of ten nuevoleoneses of various types — eight singles flanked by two couples — greets viewers near the show’s entrance.

“Suburbia Mexicana” (2005-10) comprises several small series of twelve to sixteen photos each. “Fragmented Cities, Escobedo” depicts the construction of affordable suburban housing with rows of minimalist cubical dwellings laid out in rows, as if extruded, recalling the “ticky-tacky little boxes” of Malvina Reynolds’ folk song about postwar hillside housing developments south of San Francisco, and in contrast to the scenic backdrop of the Sierra Madre Oriental foothills of northeastern Mexico.

“Urban Holes” shows the vacant lots of Monterrey, the neglected public spaces between private properties, seen with the eye of an abstract painter. “Lost Rivers” presents traditional nature-photography views of the Santa Catarina River. For “People of Suburbia,” Cartagena photographed his neighbors and their neighborhoods in casual candid poses, unassuming slices of daily life in Monterrey.

In “Construcciones” (2014), the then twenty-four-year-old artist posed for what might be termed cosplay selfies exploring the idea of identity as social construct, an approach popularized by Cindy Sherman. In these thirteen self-portraits, identically composed, the artist poses, variously costumed, between a blackboard inscribed with various sardonic titles — mentiroso (liar), papapitufo (Papa Smurf), pendejo (stupid), pinto (painted), pinche pelon (damned bald man), guero (blond) — and a construction helmet. The props symbolize the antithetical realms of mental and physical work.

The “Carpoolers” series (2014) finally catapulted Cartagena to the attention of the art world with a push from the New York Times. The forty-two identically framed shots of pickup truck beds, laden with building materials and day laborers sprawled or standing amid their equipment and materials, headed to the new suburbs of south Monterrey, were taken from a Highway 85 freeway pedestrian overpass. The term “Carpoolers” has no Spanish equivalent, and is probably meant ironically anyway; it merges a humanist view of economic reality with pseudo-scientific presentation.

The empirical-evidence aspect of Cartagena’s early work has in recent years been superseded in his oeuvre by abstraction, conceptualism, and the investigation of new technology. Influenced by the photographer-publishers Gerardo Montiel Klint and Paul Graham, he had used artifice in his “Construcciones” self-portraits to expand beyond the straight, single-moment, decisive-image straight photography embraced by photo purists. Abstraction becomes more prominent in the silhouette photos of a man and a woman glimpsed through a checkpoint gate grid in the “Invisible Line” series (2010-17), one of several bodies of work examining the Mexican-American border both physically and psychologically: build/finish the pixelated wall! 

One image of the borderland landscape is even bisected by a wooden wall, seen perpendicularly, a thin line of demarcation. In several collage works from his “Photographic Structures” series (2019), Cartagena cuts his old photos into small squares and reassembles them into puzzle pieces held in place by small circular magnets. In others, subtitled “Grupos Recortadas,” the artist, who discovered a lifelong interest in archives and found images at an early job scanning historical photographs, resurrects anonymous black and white photos but carefully excises the people, leaving documents of long-ago events with the participants seemingly erased by time. One large circular photo collage towards the end of the exhibition serves as a minimalist valediction to representation: dozens of photos of the night sky are arranged into six concentric rings around a circular aperture, like the pupil of an eye or a camera lens, forming a shell or shield that evokes the night sky, mapped but featureless.

Following Cartagena’s realist early work as it evolved toward abstraction and conceptualism, I was reminded of Walker Evans’ 2017 retrospective at SFMOMA, which opened with his famous social documentary photos of 1930s Depression America, published in James Agee’s book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” In later years Evans took unexpected experimental directions with color and Polaroid photography, covert candid photography in subway cars (with the camera peeping out from Evans’ buttoned-up overcoat, tripped by a cable release), and even painting. 

The photography world has radically changed since Evans’ era, with the development of digital media and the online publication of millions of images every day, a true museum without walls (or curation). Cartagena characterizes this as “trillions and trillions of photographs, an endless pit of visual garbage that no human will ever be able to see in their lifetime.” Despite his sardonic take on algorithm-driven image glut, Cartagena sees emerging AI through a hopeful lens, as a powerful tool for excavating meaning from the media refuse heap.