Santa Barbara: Return Jobs Back to US
Alejandro Cartagena
Skinner boox
Text by Jonathan Blaustein
Softcover
112 pages
230 x 340 mm
2016
ISBN: 9788894134124
The surface of a city can lure us into its immediate beauty. It is through walking and getting lost that the surface seems to peel away and present new impressions. During a residency in Santa Barbara California, Alejandro took to the streets and to the World Wide Web to explore the idea of what this place could be. He was interested in how it had been previously constructed in the mind of the outsider; was it a college town? The home of Opera Winfrey and other Hollywood stars? The Soap Opera of the 90´s? The site of school shootings? Though on the exterior this small tourist town seemed the picture-perfect American-Mediterranean escape, just under the façade seemed to lay something uneasy. Santa Barbara is Cartagena’s explorations of a narrative of that that can only be felt from the outside. It is a book about perceptions of a place. It suggests that nothing is immovable and no one is safe.
About the Artist
Alejandro Cartagena was born in 1977 in the Dominican Republic. He now lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. Cartagena’s projects employ landscape and portraiture as a means to examine social, urban and environmental issues.
About the Publisher
Skinner Boox is a small independent publishing house focused on contemporary photography.
