March 2010
Circuit Gallery is very pleased to present work by Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena from his award winning Lost Rivers series.
Untitled Lost River #10, from the Suburbia Mexicana Project, 2008
Coming from a deeply felt love and concern for the landscape, Cartagena’s Lost Rivers series presents exquisite images of dried-up streams and river beds, visually rich in detail, colour, and light. While aesthetically alluring, these photographs simultaneously offer a poignant social commentary on the ecological and environmental effects of untempered urban expansion.
Lost Rivers is one part of a larger project entitled Suburbia Mexicana: Cause and Effect, which seeks to tell a complex story of contemporary Mexican urban development and expansion: from urban gentrification and inner-city ‘ghettoization,’ to the seemingly unplanned and unhampered suburban sprawl emanating from many of its fast growing cities.
from Suburbia Mexicana: Fragmented Cities
In Lost Rivers, Cartagena turns his attention specifically to the unintended environmental consequences of such rapid and unplanned growth, in this case in the region surrounding the northern city of Monterrey. (Monterrey, the third largest city in Mexico, has witnessed explosive growth over the past two decades with a current estimated population of 5.1 million in the metropolitan region). In order to meet increased demand for water from the fast expanding suburbs of Monterrey, many of the region’s rivers were re-routed and dammed, and as a consequence many of the rivers and streams have dried out, or are in the process of drying up.
Untitled Lost River #9, from the Suburbia Mexicana Project, 2008
The images in this series subtly document the direct effects of “wrongly implemented economical strategies” on the local ecosystem, all the while exposing a beauty that, despite this, inheres in the landscape. As the river beds become scars, and trash and graffiti punctuate quasi-picturesque scenes, Cartagena gives us a poignant yet ambivalent testament to the absolute interdependence of humans and our environment.
Untitled Lost River #2, from the Suburbia Mexicana Project, 2008
See more photographic work from this series by Alejandro Cartagena available through Circuit Gallery:
Untitled Lost River #4, from the Suburbia Mexicana Project, 2008
Untitled Lost River #3, from the Suburbia Mexicana series
Untitled Lost River #7, from the Suburbia Mexicana Project, 2008
March 19th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
these are stunning pieces, thank you for posting.