The Car Poolers is a project that continues my visual research on how the suburbs impact the lanscape, the city and its inhabitants. I’ve been shooting the project for a year on Monterey’s highway 85 going south bound to one of the riches cities in Latin America, San Pedro Garza Garcia, one of 9 cities that conform the Metropolitan area. The images address overgrowth issues in Mexico, where suburbs are being built far from the urban centers, causing greater commutes and consumption of gas.

Alejandro Cartagena (b. 1977, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban and environmental issues. Cartagena’s work has been exhibited internationally and is in the collections of several museums including the SFMoMA, the MoCP, and the Portland Museum of Art. Cartagena has received the Photolucida Critical Mass Book Award, the Lente Latino Award in Chile, and the Premio IILA-FotoGrafia 2012 Award in Rome. He has been named a FOAM magazine TALENT and one of PDN’s 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 Photoespana Descubrimientos Award and the FOAM Paul Huff Award. His work has been published internationally in magazines such as Newsweek, Nowness, Domus, the Financial Times, Le Monde, Stern, PDN, The New Yorker, and Wallpaper among others.