Every day, residents of various municipalities in the eastern part of the State of Mexico jump over a retaining wall located at the Chalco-Ixtapaluca road interchange, near the Chalco toll booth. Inscribed on it is the phrase: "EL MURO DE DONAL TROMP PURO ABANCE." People arrive at this point to catch the various public transportation routes necessary for their daily mobility. To cross, they must run and dodge cars traveling at high speed. Some of the testimonies gathered at the site indicate that a small combi stop used to be located there; however, its relocation was not considered in the recent public works. In its place, an enormous pedestrian bridge was built, but it does not provide access to the points where people board and get off public transportation.

Shipping starts in October 2026

A new wave of immigrants from Central America, Hondurans and Haitians, is making its way toward the United States. These images were taken at La Coyotera in Monterrey, Mexico, a place where they have settled or are in transit. These moments represent instances when migrants complete, or are suspended in the limbo of, their journey on a train known as "The Beast." They travel in groups to increase their chances of survival. Elbows, feet, hands, and knees come together in the search for belonging, identity, safety, and strength.

Shipping starts in October 2026

Since 2021, Alejandro Luperca Morales has been recording and monitoring public livestream cameras installed at the Paso del Norte International Bridge, which connects Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, with El Paso, Texas. These cameras operate continuously, capturing both the everyday rhythm of the crossing and the moments of tension that define it. On March 12, 2023, hundreds of migrants attempted to cross the bridge by force. The artist happened to be watching the livestream as events unfolded: the feed showed a large crowd moving toward the border, officials closing the gates, and then—suddenly—the image cutting back to its usual scene of traffic and pedestrians. Because the cameras do not archive footage, that moment vanished as soon as it occurred. The project began from that realization: border events appear and disappear in real time, visible only to whoever happens to be watching. By capturing screenshots, data fragments, and interruptions in the feed, the artist attempts to hold on to what surveillance itself refuses to preserve.

Shipping starts in October 2026

Architectural photographer Cristobal Palma has taken a series of photos revealing the 46 spiralling shopping centres built across Chile in the 1970s and 80s. Known as caracoles, meaning snails, these unusual buildings are believed to have taken inspiration from the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Guggenheim Museum in New York. According to Palma, the shopping centres are a dying breed. Not only have they struggled to compete with the modern mall, but they have also become symbolic of a turbulent period in the nation's history. He found 26 of these structures found in the capital, plus a further 17 dotted across other Chilean cities. If the mall symbolises the triumph of the neoliberal city propelled by Pinochet's economic reforms, the caracoles seem to represent the final link in an interrupted city that never managed to be reconnected again.

Shipping starts in October 2026

In the Metropolitan Area of Monterrey (MAM), buses in the public transportation system can be rented as mobile advertising billboards. Their giant bodies are wrapped in advertisements for chicken stock, condoms, shampoos, or government anti-obesity campaigns. Passengers cannot see from the inside what they are projecting on the outside. Not even while being transported to their workplaces does the exploitation cease. Some background on public transportation in the MAM is necessary here. Contrary to global trends, the use of private cars continues to grow, despite arguments about their inefficient energy use and contribution to global warming. This local phenomenon is related to the fact that, over the past five years, the city’s bus fleet has been reduced by 30 percent. Public transportation is facing an acute crisis. As soon as they are able, commuters buy the cheapest car they can afford, thereby sparing themselves up to two hours on their daily journeys due to poor route planning and long waiting times (60 percent of people wait more than 20 minutes for a bus), not to mention the uncertainty of such journeys, whether because of crashes (an average of 20 per day) or robberies (an average of one per day). As if this were not enough, 91.6 percent of women have experienced sexual violence at least once while traveling on public transportation in the MAM. This situation remains invisible to decision-makers, who travel in private vehicles. The precarious state of public transportation, and mobility more broadly, remains severely underrepresented in public debate, condemned to languish on public “to-do” lists. In this context, the work of Alejandro Cartagena assumes specific political importance by making visible the costs of this inaction on the quality of life of people living in the MAM. Indeed, the sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos emphasizes the need to represent and render visible human suffering through images in order to destabilize social injustice.

23,5 x 32,0 cm
112 Pages
Softbound
Edition of 500
2026
Published by The Velvet Cell and Los Sumergidos

Shipping starts in October 2026

Fossils translates the altered photographic objects of Alejandro's "Photographic Structures" series into the form of a book, extending their transformation from discarded images into a new system of meaning. Removed from their original contexts, cut apart, rearranged, and now sequenced across pages, these expired photographs are no longer bound to the people, events, or intentions they once represented. Their absences, repetitions, and remaining visual structures become a kind of photographic residue. The book proposes that photographs do not simply lose their meaning as they age; they become available for new meanings. Like fossils, they retain the traces of previous lives while entering new temporal, material, and interpretive conditions, revealing photography as a malleable medium, in spite of its indexical nature.

21.5 X 13.5 cm
56 Transparencies
Edition of 200

2026
Published by Los Sumergidos

The Most Beautiful Skies Happen When You Are Shopping looks at how awe has been standardized through images and the internet. Composed entirely of photographs found online, the book treats the internet as a camera: a distributed system through which millions of people record, repeat, and confirm the same visual experiences. Sunsets, clouds, and dramatic skies appear across malls, parking lots, and commercial landscapes, turning the sublime into a familiar backdrop for consumption. What once seemed rare or transcendent becomes endlessly available, recognizable, and interchangeable. The small book is not only about beautiful skies, but about how networked images flatten difference, transforming wonder into a shared visual convention.

Alejandro Cartagena
Softcover
20.5 cm x 13.5 cm
80 pages
Edition of 120
2026
Published by Los Sumergidos

Nuevo León: The Future Is Not Written explored the social complexities and contradictions of life in a twenty-first-century city through contemporary photography.

Curated by Mauricio Maillé and Ariadna Ramonetti, the exhibition brought together 602 works by ten photographers and one collective. In the order in which they appeared throughout MARCO’s galleries, the exhibition featured works by Aristeo Jiménez, Yvonne Venegas, Oswaldo Ruiz, Alejandro Cartagena, the collective Estética Unisex, formed by Lorena Estrada and Futuro Moncada, Loreto Villarreal, Stefan Ruiz, Ruth Rodríguez, Salomé Fuentes, Sofía Ayarzagoitia, and Juan Rodrigo Llaguno. Their practices address subjects including urban growth, labor culture, and the everyday lives of different social groups.

Most of the artists are from Nuevo León or have explored issues connected to and unfolding within the region throughout their careers. These conditions, however, are not exclusive to a single geographic location. Rather, they are shared by many places across Latin America.

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Nuevo León: El futuro no está escrito exploró las complejidades y contradicciones sociales de habitar en una ciudad del siglo XXI, a partir de la fotografía contemporánea.

Bajo la curaduría de Mauricio Maillé y Ariadna Ramonetti, la exposición reúne 602 obras de 10 fotógrafos y un colectivo. Por orden de aparición, en las salas de MARCO se encuentra la obra de Aristeo Jiménez, Yvonne Venegas, Oswaldo Ruíz, Alejandro Cartagena, el colectivo Estética Unisex (conformado por Lorena Estrada y Futuro Moncada), Loreto Villarreal, Stefan Ruiz, Ruth Rodríguez, Salomé Fuentes, Sofía Ayarzagoitia y Juan Rodrigo Llaguno, quienes han abordado temas como el crecimiento urbano, la cultura laboral, la vida cotidiana de distintos grupos sociales, entre otros.

La mayoría de los artistas son originarios de Nuevo León, o bien en su carrera han explorado asuntos que conciernen y suceden en la región, pero no por ello son situaciones exclusivas de un solo punto geográfico. Estas, más bien, son condiciones compartidas con otras localidades del continente latinoamericano.

Publication date 2024
24 × 30 cm
Hardcover lined with printed and laminated paper, 320 pages, 320 images
Bilingual edition in English and Spanish
ISBN 978-84-10290-09-9
Texts by Mauricio Maillé, Ariadna Ramonetti, Alfonso Morales, Alejandro Castellanos, Alberto Ruy Sánchez, and others
Editorial Design by David Maawad
Co-published with Museo MARCO

“Carpoolers is a deceptively powerful photobook, so well constructed that we’re suddenly eager to see more of something we had previously ignored”. — Loring Knoblauch for Collector Daily

Publication date 2026
21.5 X 33.5 cm

Hardcover, 112 pages, Offset printing

Signed and numbered Edition of 100 with one 8 x 12 inch C-print

Edited by Alejandro Cartagena and Fernando Gallegos

Text by Brad Feuerhelm

Editorial Design by Alejandro Cartagena

Printed in Istanbul by Mas Matbaa

Published by Los Sumergidos and Alejandro Cartagena

“Carpoolers is a deceptively powerful photobook, so well constructed that we’re suddenly eager to see more of something we had previously ignored”. — Loring Knoblauch for Collector Daily

Publication date 2026
21.5 X 33.5 cm

Hardcover, 112 pages, Offset printing

Edited by Alejandro Cartagena and Fernando Gallegos

Text by Brad Feuerhelm

Editorial Design by Alejandro Cartagena

Printed in Istanbul by Mas Matbaa

Published by Los Sumergidos and Alejandro Cartagena

During a period of six years Alejandro Morales collected more than 500 photographs depicting bodies published his local newspaper P.M. in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The time of extreme violence made Ciudad Juárez among the most violent cities in the world, marked by the large number of intentional homicides committed in its streets. The limits of what the press could publish were blurred as it was so common to find oneself in the middle of a shootout or come across an abandoned corpse. Morales removed all the corpses that he found in the photographs in the P.M. Newspaper by manually erasing them with a gum eraser.

112 pages / 74 works / 17 x 22,7 cm,Swiss bound softcover, Offset printingLenticular photographs mounted on coversISBN 978-91-987606-5-1,First Edition of 600TVC085

Co-published by Kult Books and Los SumergidosDesigned by Fernando GallegosMay 2023

Shortlisted for the 2022 LUMA RENCONTRES DUMMY BOOK AWARD

Julia Gaisbacher focuses on the Austrian architect Eilfried Huth and one of the first, publicly funded participatory social housing projects in Austria from the 1970s. About 50 years later, she started an artistic research project, asking residents how they had experienced the participatory planning process and its impacts on the long-term living quality in these built environments and combined them with archive material, documenting the unique facades of the houses each representing the owners.

160 pages / 21,5 x 28 cm,Hardcover, Japanese Binding,ISBN 978-1-908889-85-0,Limited Edition of 500TVC085

Shortlisted for the PHotoESPAÑA Best Photobook of the Year

Shortlisted for the ARLES Author Book Award 2023

“The smart thing about Los Sumergidos is the way these images of nights, roads, red lights, and tired faces link to the images we already have in our heads. And then we project characters (Teresa, her mother Luisa, her absent father) and narratives onto the people we see and the story takes shape. The introductory text helps with this (the journal text less so) as do the multiple narrative strands. All things are possible in Los Sumergidos for Teresa, it’s just that some things are more possible than others. And that’s what the pictures tell us.” Colin Pantall for the Photogorphic Museum of Humanity

Los Sumergidos, Self published by Carlos Loret de Mola, Alejandro Cartagena, Juan Madrid, Freddy Martinez, Fernando Gallegos

Authors: Carlos Loret de Mola, Alejandro Cartagena, Juan Madrid, Freddy Martinez, Fernando Gallegos
Design: Roberto Salazar
Prepress: La Troupe
Printed in Brizzolis Spain
Offset print, Pages: 112
Size: 7 3/4 x 10 1/2 inches
Soft Cover

“Many people died that day. I wanted to say something about it, but it was emotionally overwhelming. Then I realised that I could use the buildings covered in black as involuntary signs of mourning. Many of them had been damaged by the earthquake, while others were new buildings being developed through shady agreements. With Undercover I seek to cast light on this issue of systemic corruption in Mexico City” – Onnis Luque

Introducing TVC América Latina: a joint publishing project between The Velvet Cell and Alejandro Cartagena. TVC:AL is a platform for Latinx artists and projects that explore Latin American cities and culture through photography and text.

On the 19.9.17, an earthquake measuring 7.1 occurred near Mexico City. A number of buildings in the capital were destroyed and at least 200 fatalities have been reported to date. Remarkably, the event happened exactly on the 32nd anniversary of the devastating magnitude 8.1 Mexico City earthquake of 1985.

Journalist’s investigations into the disaster revealed that many of the buildings affected had been built to improper standards. The corruption between the state and the property companies was found to have caused multiple unnecessary deaths. As a photographer and architect Onnis Luque wanted to address these events in his work. Having lived through both earthquakes inspired him to create a visual metaphor on the uncertainty that these tragedies produce.

“Some of the most vivid and exciting memories from my childhood happened along the Acapulco-Zihuatanejo National Highway. This is a book about the people I saw and eventually met on those journeys” Melba Arellano

Melba ArellanoSoftcover18 X 27.5 cm96 pages
Signed and numbered Edition of 100 with two 8.5 X 6 inch C-print2021
Published by Los Sumergidos**Only ships from Mexico
Shortlisted for the Aperture Paris Photo First Book Award

“Some of the most vivid and exciting memories from my childhood happened along the Acapulco-Zihuatanejo National Highway. This is a book about the people
I saw and eventually met on those journeys” Melba Arellano

Melba Arellano
Softcover
18 X 27.5 cm
96 pages
2021
Published by Los Sumergidos
Shortlisted for the Aperture Paris Photo First Book Award