Photography: ‘Carpoolers’ by Alejandro Cartagena

Alejandro Cartagena is a Dominican Republic-born Mexican photographer. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art. His critically acclaimed photo project captured bird’s-eye-view images of Mexican workers commuting to their jobs in the beds of pickup trucks.

Cartagena is interested in the “effects of suburban sprawl on population growth and the environment in his home city” of Monterrey, Mexico. For ‘Carpoolers’ he photographed construction workers from above, travelling to work along Mexican Federal Highway 85 in the back of their contractors’ trucks, in 2011. Highway 85 links the city centre and its wealthier parts with the surrounding suburban sprawl.

“Construction workers were buying houses an hour or more away from where they worked and there is no public transportation for them, so I started documenting how people used their cars,” Cartagena explained about the project, “how they drive to work or drive home, how they personalize their cars based on the neighborhoods in which they lived, and I started looking down from buildings and bridges to see how cars looked. It’s not uncommon to see the carpoolers, but I had never seen them from that perspective.”