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On Lost Rivers and Other Man-Altered Landscapes: A Conversation with Alejandro

Cartagena

Lisa Uddin

in Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Criticism 38.3, November/December 2010

Untitled Lost River #10, from the project “Suburbia Mexicana” (2008) by Alejandro Cartagena

The problem of imaging ecological harm is not getting any easier. Artists who have taken a

documentary approach now seem almost quaint in their investments. Painters from the

nineteenth-century Hudson River School, for example, gave audiences composite scenes of a

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romantic, indigenous wilderness on the cusp of industrial expansion. A hundred years later, in

distilled photographs of western mountain ranges, lakes, and dunes, Ansel Adams expunged the

human presence altogether, instead sacralizing nature. These ways of seeing are tricky in the face

of contemporary environmental problems, largely because they register and reinforce certain

binaries—nature/culture, city/country, human/nonhuman—that routinely collapse under the

operations of advanced capitalism. How then to picture the damage wreaked by these operations?

And how to picture it in ways that are sensitive to the enduring appeal of that which we call

natural?

The landscape aesthetics of Alejandro Cartagena offer one possibility. Dominican-born

Cartagena spent two years photographing the desiccation of streams and rivers in and around the

metropolitan area of Monterrey, Mexico. Entitled “Lost Rivers” [2007-2008], the resulting series

makes up part of Cartagena’s larger project on Mexican real estate development, which tackles

the complexities of tract housing, home ownership, and inner-city decay. “Lost Rivers” is an

integrated feature of “Suburbia Mexicana: Cause and Effect” [2006-2009], a lush and moving

testimony of the toll taken on ecosystems enmeshed in the region’s rapid growth.

Crucially, Cartagena’s art also represents a rediscovery of imagemakers featured in the

watershed exhibit, “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape.” Curated in

1975 by William Jenkins at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and re-

launched in 2009 for an international tour, the exhibit featured work by Robert Adams, Lewis

Baltz, Joe Deal, Frank Gohlke, and six others, and marked a radical turning point in picturing the

American landscape. The New Topographers eschewed idealized treatments of nature by

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showing, with an understated irony, its presence as a constitutive part of the built environment.

These sharply focused photographs took familiar elements of the landscape tradition—trees,

mountains, deserts, waterways—and placed them in matter-of-fact conversation with the

subdivisions, roadsides, industrial parks, and parking lots that stood by and around them.1 More

central to Cartagena’s practice, however, is the extent to which their man-altered landscapes

resonate with the current experience and effects of Monterrey’s sprawl and Latin American

suburbanization more broadly.

This past summer, I had the opportunity to interview the photographer about these and related

concerns. Our three-month email exchange revealed “Lost Rivers” as an exploration of the

shifting and layered dimensions of all environments under strain. Cartagena gives us a potent

example of what cultural theorist Ursula Heise provocatively calls “eco-cosmopolitanism,” an

environmental imagination that, while responsible to the local, refuses to stay in and speak from

one particular place.2

lisa uddin: I want to begin from a place of urgency. I’ve been digesting the daily stream of

images coming in from the BP Oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, mostly from a popular

photo blog called The Big Picture.3 Today’s scenes, for example, include an aerial shot of

an oil slick moving toward an umbrella-lined beach, a wide-angled image of pooling oil

along coastal marshlands, and several close-ups of coated pelicans, turtles, and crabs

struggling at the shoreline. I find it difficult to breathe when I look at these pictures, and

they resonate with me long after I stop looking. I am wondering if and how they are

affecting you.

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alejandro cartagena: So many things come to mind when looking at those images: greed,

helplessness, anger, tragedy, disgrace. . . . The BP issue is such a big thing to tackle, both as

spectator and as a possible “victim” of the situation. As an artist I have tried to be a

communicator of the things that trouble me, and when I see and hear of what is happening in the

Gulf of Mexico I feel completely castrated. I mean, there is nothing much I could do visually to

invigorate the knowledge of the problem at this point. I really think that our task as visual

thinkers might have to come in later stages, where we can somehow tackle the immediate and

focus attention on the things that made this happen. I guess ultimately as a human being, I wish I

could do more to help the people and animals being directly affected by this horrible situation.

lu: Me too. I agree that the visual information coming out of the Gulf right now is very

powerful in the sense of giving spectators dynamic, high-resolution views of the region at

multiple scales and sites, but also that it is deeply disempowering in the sense that they

make us witnesses to a disaster that is still in full and horrifying effect. Can you elaborate

on what kinds of visual thinking you see as necessary for the long term?

ac: Visual representations could work to skip the obvious and instead try to point out some of the

constructions of need for the use of fossil fuels. How have we been constructed, ideologically

and psychologically, as a modern culture where we see as “natural” the use and exploitation of

these natural resources? What structures are in place that make us need these fuels? These might

be very uncomfortable things to become aware of and extremely hard to visually represent.

There are efforts such as Edward Burtynsky’s work “Oil,” that have pointed out how we get the

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oil, how we use it, and some of the residues of that consumption. But I feel we are ready to see

something that deals with the abstract ideas of how we’ve been made into an oil culture.

lu: The images in your “Lost Rivers” series seem to be in line with this representational

strategy, and demonstrate its difficulty. At one angle, the photographs address, and re-

enact, a cultural lament and longing for unspoiled natural spaces. At another angle, they

document the ecological stress on actual rivers and streams via Monterrey’s explosive

urbanization. Both types of loss are held in view in these pictures. How do you understand

this sort of partnership? What kinds of possibilities does it present? Where do things break

down, if anywhere?

ac: I don’t know if both happen at the same time for all viewers, but I definitely see it being part

of my effort to produce more complex observations of our society. Landscape has that

possibility—to have cultural and ecological issues represented through it—and I think that is

why I’ve been so excited about exploring it. In a way, I am thinking anthropologically about

these spaces. Some of the things that move my production include looking for symbolic

meanings in how things are constructed, deconstructed, layered, planned, and unplanned. This

not only lets me deal with things aesthetically but intellectually, and this makes me feel much

more committed to what I’m portraying. At the same time, it opens up many more things to

explore.

But to look at any subject from multiple layers—cultural, ecological, political, etc.—can also

make for too-difficult images. This is where I see photographers like Paul Graham, Martin Parr,

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Alec Soth, Taj Forer, and others broadening photography these days. They are producing images

that are either extremely quiet or loud, but always packed with meaning. Their books are

meditations on, and experiments in, how to show those interrelationships. But yes, the

partnerships can break down at some point if the theoretical part is not appropriately channeled

to the aesthetics of the work.

Untitled Lost River #18, from the project “Suburbia Mexicana” (2008) by Alejandro Cartagena

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lu: Your anthropological and multi-layered approach is also in conversation with

photographers from the 1975 “New Topographics” exhibit, who were similarly interested

in depicting the “man-altered landscape” of urban development. I am curious about where

“Lost Rivers” sits in relation to a body of work that has been both critiqued and praised

for its deadpan views. Clearly, you are not hostile to the romantic traditions that the New

Topographers rejected, nor do you let us settle into picturesque beauty. For every color-

saturated riverbed or ravine, there is a concrete or steel interruption. Waterways that

mirror trees, earth, and sky, or glow in the shifting daylight, are at alarmingly low levels,

and are sometimes strewn with garbage. Photographs of completely waterless waterways

exude a serenity that enchants as much as it disturbs or documents. Given this productive

ambiguity, how do you respond to the work of, for example, Joe Deal, Lewis Baltz, or

Robert Adams?

ac: To start, it was a sad thing to learn about the passing of Joe Deal. I just recently purchased a

copy of his book Southern California Photographs, 1976–86 (1992) [published by the University

of New Mexico Press in association with the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery], and I was

amazed at the range of work he did. It seems to me that he was very “anthropological” in his

approach and could appreciate a more complex and symbolic look at our current environmental

and social degradation. As for the rest of those imagemakers, it seems to me that they have in

one way or another moved toward more romantic representations, literally and metaphorically,

where form seems to gain greater importance. This creates in the spectator, or at least in me, a

nostalgia for their past “critical” bodies of work, such as Robert Adams’s “The New West”

(1974).

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Initially, the New Topographic photographers were not very present in my work, but as soon as I

tried to contextualize what I was doing, they started popping up everywhere in it, and that’s

when I really got into understanding the connection. When I began making my landscape

images, suburbanization in Mexico was in the midst of its twenty-first-century boom. It was clear

that I had embarked on a body of work that was almost homogenous to some of the New

Topographers, only three decades later. What could I answer with my images that would be

directly linked to some of the questions presented by these earlier photographers? I had to

rethink how to synchronize my work with that past, but also with contemporary thoughts on

suburbia and the altered landscape. A view of these altered spaces had to be somehow different,

because, at least theoretically, we have seen the failure of suburbia, and simply a direct view of it

in a different context would not produce a refreshing approach. We need to look at why, despite

its failures, suburbia still happens, who makes it happen, what are its consequences, and what are

all the different parts that conform to it.

lu: I’m curious about the differences between your work and the New Topographers—

historical differences and also differences of geography. One thing that is so striking about

the New Topographers’ work is the status of place. Adams’s and Deals’s images of

Colorado and Albuquerque housing developments, for example, read as some version of

the American West, but one that is stripped of a wilderness mythology. Baltz’s photos of

corporate architecture embody that aesthetic of mass-produced California modernism, but

are framed in a way that blocks any of its sex appeal. In other words, place seems to matter

in these pictures, but only perhaps in service of the now familiar suburban critique of

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placelessness: the notion that there was no real sense of place in the suburban landscape of

the 1970s. You could be anywhere. Does that still resonate with you as a photographer of

contemporary Mexican suburbanization?

ac: In a way, yes. When I started my project I focused on documenting the Monterrey metro

area, but as the project got bigger and I received funding I had serious doubts about sticking to

one place. But then through my editing process and sharing the images with some peers, it didn’t

seem to be a problem that I would talk about the whole of Mexican suburbanization from one

particular place, because, aesthetically, all these places are the same. So in a way, the

placelessness of suburban America still resonates in my images.

I think it is essential to point out that, as a social phenomenon, the promotion of suburbanization

in Mexico has blindfolded itself completely to any considerations or particularities of suburban

history, and has made the same mistakes as the rest of North America. It is like the thirty-year

gap between my images and the New Topographers has never really existed. Even some of the

cars, in the last part of the [“Suburbia Mexicana”] project, are from the late 1970s and mid-

‘80s—a weird kind of déjà vu.

lu: Yes, as someone who was raised in the suburbs of Toronto in that period, there is

something very familiar here, but also quite strange. While the cars and topographies are

familiar, I cannot say the same for the housing subdivisions that sit in the background of

these altered landscapes. These brightly colored flat-roofed boxes suggest to me a real

difference of location, of aesthetics, and perhaps of ways of living more generally.

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ac: The suburbs I grew up in, in the Dominican Republic, were different from these as well.

They had such a different feel to them. The scale of repetition and genericness in Mexican

suburbs overwhelms me. I also find the lack of cohesive space in which to socialize disturbing.

In the Dominican Republic, we had more than just pavement, and we were still close to the city.

But then again, for Mexican homeowners, I wonder if these new houses are better than living in

a single room with their in-laws.

Untitled Lost River #17, from the project “Suburbia Mexicana” (2009), by Alejandro Cartagena

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lu: So what happens when your work travels outside of Mexico? You’ve had the chance to

bring “Lost Rivers” to different galleries in the United States and Canada. Your online

presence and international press coverage has expanded your audience further. How do

you think it is changing the meanings of the work, or is it?

ac: There is a definite change of meaning for the Latin American and the U.S.-Canadian

spectator. I can’t say there is no tradition concerning landscape in Mexico; the nineteenth-

century painters José María Velasco and Dr. Atl come to mind, for example. Despite their

differences, both were interested in nature—its order, meaning, and especially its aesthetics. But

there is a certain assumption that landscape today, in the form of “direct landscape photography,”

lacks any of this value, which you can see in its relative absence from contemporary art circuits.

It was a bit of a shock not to have many venues in which my images could fit here in Mexico, so

I introduced my work to international venues and saw how my images were somehow speaking

the same language.

I guess my images have a not-so-Latin American style (if there is such a style). They relate to a

grander scheme of environmental, social, and aesthetic concerns that are shared by

photographers like Graham, Adams, Misrach, and John Pfal. At the same time, my work deals

fully with things happening here in Monterrey, and my battles right now are local. I really want

to make a point about how landscape can be a critical voice for the problems we face with

overgrowth, lack of infrastructure, and the current drug war. For me, this has a lot to do with the

inability of local governments to provide active governance for their overpopulated

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municipalities, opening up loopholes for drug dealers to inhabit and control the outskirts of urban

Monterrey.

lu: I would guess that most nineteenth-century landscape painters, and twentieth-century

landscape photographers, were largely oblivious to these kinds of challenges or their

historical equivalents, regardless of their nationality. Is it fair then to suggest that “Lost

Rivers” reaches for yet another sense of loss—that is, the loss of borders between ways of

engaging the very idea of suburbia?

ac: I really think suburbia is one of those things that has its invisible tentacles around everything.

We cannot think of our contemporary world without it. As imagemakers I think we can commit

to a responsible type of production that can stand between the aesthetic and the social

commentary, creating the possibility of broader analysis. My pointing out these dying rivers is

making something visible that could have continued that way for a long time. Will it ignite

change right away? I doubt it. Latin American culture from where I see it is in the first stage of

the idealism of home ownership. Major portions of its people are experiencing for the first time

the responsibility of land ownership that will eventually, I hope, create a sense of responsibility

to the land itself. But this first high will last for some time, and when things become truly

unbearable, maybe then we can think of implementing environmentally conscious policies and

regulations. Mexican suburbia is a sort of Foucauldian panopticon, working through less and less

overt authority that grows increasingly invisible to its inhabitants, for they have become an

integral part of it.

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lisa uddin is a Washington D.C.-based cultural critic and historian who teaches at the

Corcoran College of Art and Design.

NOTES 1. Whether or not the New Topographers were critical of the ideology of American

landscape and of suburbia in the 1960s and 70s has been the subject of some debate. See

Deborah Bright, “Of Mother Nature and Marlboro Men: An Inquiry into the Cultural Meanings

of Landscape Photography.” Revised reprint in Richard Bolton, ed., The Contest of Meaning

(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987) [exposure 23:1(1985)]; Kelly Dennis, “Landscape and the West:

Irony and Critique in New Topographic Photography.” Paper presented at the Forum UNESCO

University and Heritage 10th International Seminar “Cultural Landscapes in the 21st Century,”

Newcastle-upon-Tyne, April 11–16, 2005, Revised July 2006; Britt Salveson, New Topographics.

(Gottingen: Steidl Publishers, 2009). 2. Ursula K. Heise, Sense of Place and Sense of Planet:

The Environmental Imagination of the Global (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press,

2008). 3. See www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/06/scenes_from_the_gulf_of_mexico.html.