A Small Guide to Homeownership is an amalgamation of 13 years of work, starting with Cartagena´s Fragmented Cities series made between 2005 and 2009 in which he documented the suburbanization of the Monterrey metro area in northern Mexico. This project began an exploration that led him to document the changes that this development brought to the city; from transportation, urban planning, infrastructure development, private and public bureaucracy, the challenges in people’s daily life to the ecological consequences of this unplanned growth.

Alejandro Cartagena, Mexican (b. 1977, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic) lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban and environmental issues. Cartagena’s work has been exhibited internationally in more than 50 group and individual exhibitions and his work is in the collections of several museums including the San Francisco MOMA, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the Portland Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art among others.