Alejandro Cartagena www. livingartroom. com / alejandro _ cartagena
That which cannot be seen in the photography of Alejandro Cartagena by Salvador Alanis
A common worry in contemporary expression is to reflect in a direct language what cannot be immediately seen. Against the evidence and obscenity of the media, the artist faces the choice of playing with the same values of a formal articulation that wants to show it all to refer to what lies beyond the image. Within the apparently quotidian, the artist showcases a subtext that transcends formality. Alejandro Cartagena( Dominican Republic, 1977) plays with the formal values of documentary photography to subvert the discourse and point out the discontinuity of what we see pictured.
To Cartagena, the so called photodocument is a worthy tool for personal expression, or as the Mexican photography critic José Antonio Rodríguez said, it means the work of“ external circumstance as an individual urge” 1.
At first Cartagena, who lives in Mexico, takes part in that country’ s photographic tradition that takes the landscape as a main objective to structure the discourse. Said tradition has been updated along the different generations, inte-
1 Rodríguez, José Antonio.“ Los procesos de la fotografía contemporánea mexicana”, Huesca Imagen. Huesca: Huesca Imagen, 2004. 12-29. www. LivingArtRoom. com / alejandro _ cartagena