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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.