Alejandro Cartagena's Photo Series Spys on Mexico's Carpoolers David Rosenberg - Slate.com
go to original February 18, 2013

Shot from a pedestrian overpass on Mexico’s Highway 85 during the winter of 2011/2012, Alejandro Cartagena’s photo series “Car Poolers” offers a bird’s-eye view of construction workers as they hitch an early-morning ride to work in the backs of pick-up trucks. (Alejandro Cartagena/Kopeikin Gallery)

Sometimes you have to look down to see what’s right in front of you.

Alejandro Cartagena did just that while working on a commission from a research institute about how people use the streets in Monterrey, Mexico.

“Construction workers were buying houses an hour or more away from where they worked and there is no public transportation for them, so I started documenting how people used their cars,” explained Cartagena about the project, “how they drive to work or drive home, how they personalize their cars based on the neighborhoods in which they lived, and I started looking down from buildings and bridges to see how cars looked. It’s not uncommon to see the carpoolers, but I had never seen them from that perspective.”

Cartagena’s vision from above started a yearlong project in the summer of 2011 that became “Car Poolers.” The series will be shown at the Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles from Feb. 23 through April 6.

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