The well-deserved accolades for Alejandro Cartagena are stacking up of late, and this morning, PDN named him to their highly lauded annual list—PDN's 30—of new and emerging photographers to watch in 2010. Two of the three images featured in the PDN slideshow will be on view in tonight's Hey, Hot Shot! Second Edition Exhibition at JBG. Alejandro will also be in attendance, so if you're in New York, come on by and offer your congratulations and greetings to the photographer himself.

David Walker of PDN writes a brief profile about Cartagena:

Alejandro Cartagena's work reflects a rigorous effort to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings--namely, his adopted city of Monterrey, but more generally, a country that is rapidly re-inventing itself economically, socially and politically....

His large-format landscapes reflect Mexico's economic stratification, its urban disintegration, and the cultural homogenization and depersonalization of its spreading suburbs. Similarly, Cartagena has explored portraiture as a way to examine culture and its "construction," he says.

We too were attracted to the ever-morphing urban landscapes that surround Cartagena: In Fragmented Cities, a disarmingly homogenized presentation of personal homes become lost as a field of indistinguishable shapes when observed from a distance. The landscape of mountains and billowing clouds in a blue sky contradicts the robotic geometry of the structures in the foreground. His Lost Rivers series also speaks to the deep ironies of "progress," and are a mournful study into nature, interrupted and exploited.

Earlier this year we had a chance to do a Q&A with Alejandro, and if you're neither in New York or in Seattle, where one of his photos will be on view at EXPOSURE: Critical Mass 2009 starting tonight, be sure to look at his portfolio online.