In the back of a navy blue pickup truck, an older man lies flat, arms and legs spread like a starfish. His face is turned toward the sky: he’s fast asleep.
It’s one of the first photographs visitors encounter in SFMOMA’s current exhibit, Ground Rules, featuring the work of photographer Alejandro Cartagena.
The image is part of his Carpool series, photographed from 2011 to 2012. Cartagena documents everyday people riding in the beds of pickup trucks in Monterrey, Mexico. Shot from a bird’s-eye view atop freeway overpasses, the photographs show day laborers, families and kids sharing food, sleeping and relaxing after long days of work.
More than a decade later, Carpool continues to circulate widely on social media.
“I didn’t think that people would resonate with the images,” Cartagena said in a recent interview with El Tecolote and 48 Hills. What inspired the series, he said, was wanting to capture Monterrey in a different light.
By returning to the same place over the course of the year, he began seeing the same people as the seasons changed. “To have the representation of everyday life, of workers surviving, that was something that I wanted to represent,” he said. “That moment of so much pain that my country was going through.”
At the time, the Mexican city of Monterrey was experiencing extreme violence amid a cartel war between Los Zetas and the Sinaloa Cartel.
Cartagena was born in the Dominican Republic in 1977 and moved to Monterrey in 1990. He began Carpool in 2011 to center the lives of everyday people overshadowed by the violence surrounding them. It was a tough undertaking. At one point, he said, he considered quitting the project altogether.
Today, he sees the work as an invitation for people to slow down and observe.
“It also became a story of how a city works, and how you have this repetition,” he said. ”Because we’re always moving, it feels like there’s chaos, but if you stand still, you see these patterns.”
One afternoon at the SFMOMA, 22-year-old Netanya Buenrostro, a student at the California College of the Arts who is Mexican and Guatemalan, wandered through the exhibit.“I wanted to come support another Latino artist,” she said. “It really inspired me.”
Buenrostro said Cartagena’s work reminded her of her own family, returning home tired from a long day working in construction.
Online, some critics have raised privacy concerns about the photographs. Others argue the images are an honest portrayal of life.
“I feel like if the pictures have been around that long, and nothing bad has come of it, it’s probably fine,” said Kota Borsdorf, who was visiting SFMOMA for her birthday. “Obviously, if it did have any bad impact, that would be important to consider. But if it didn’t, I think that it’s more important that these pictures are shown to the public … You can’t always hide what reality looks like.”
Buenrostro agreed: “I think they feel honored to be represented.”
“Ground Rules” is on view at SFMOMA through April 19th.
