Artist Talk: Alejandro Cartagena with Jessica McDonald

Photography, Architecture and the Uncertainty of the Present

This series brings together practicing artists, scholars and curators to discuss the radical potential of photography to illuminate the condition of the present, focusing on the camera's ability to represent built environments and their relationship to historical logics of accumulation.

The events consist of a 45-minute artist's talk, followed by a 45-minute lecture with the photographers' respective critic.

Event Details
Alejandro Cartagena with Jessica McDonald
October 10, 6-8 PM, Full Frame Theater (American Tobacco Campus)

Alejandro Cartagena's work focuses on pressing issues that define our contemporary moment: unsustainable economic development, sprawling urbanization and the precarity of labor. His award-winning works include: Suburbia Mexicana (2010), Carpoolers (2011), and A Guide to Infrastructure and Corruption (2015). Cartagena's work has been published internationally in magazines and newspapers such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Newsweek, Le Monde, the Financial Times, Wallpaper, Nowness, Domus, Stern, PDN, among others.

Jessica S. McDonald is the chief curator of photography at The Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas. The Ransom Center holds one of the world's most important photography collections and McDonald has organized exhibitions with a wide range of artists, from Ed Ruscha and Ralph Eugene Meatyard to Magnum Photos.