The Abstract, the Concrete, and the Labor of the Novel EMILIO SAURI Comprising, almost exclusively, photographs taken from a bridge overlooking Mexico’s Federal Highway 85, Alejandro Cartagena’s widely celebrated series of photographs, Carpoolers (2011), captures construction workers and landscapers who commute daily from the blue-collar suburbs of Monterrey to San Pedro Garza Garcı ´a in the backs of pickup trucks (see figures 1–4). Each picture is composed of the same elements: truck, road surface, and the contents found in the truck’s flatbed, including workers on their way to San Pedro who remain oblivious (for the most part) to the camera above. As one art critic puts it, each truck is “transformed from a vehicle into a frame, the rectangular bed of the truck becoming a kind of bounded canvas on which [Cartagena’s] narratives and compositions are arranged” (Knoblauch). When the dozens of photographs that make up the series are viewed together, the uniformity of composition becomes all the more conspicuous, making clear that the point is not to highlight the differences between individual pictures. While the beholder might take note of the dissimilarities among the arrangements of elements, among the models and makes of the trucks, among their cargoes, and among the persons they carry, the differences among those persons are softened not just by the repetition of these elements but also by the camera’s distance from the scene, by the materials with which workers share the flatbeds, by the clothing and hats they wear, and more often than not by their postures. The unchanging back- ground of gray pavement with white and yellow road markings, moreover, has the effect of decontextualizing the images, abstracting the figures from the setting in which they are found. Cartagena’s series raises the question of whether these are in fact simply pictures of laborers who commute to and from the lower-income sub- urbs of Monterrey or whether the beholder is being prompted to see something else altogether. Cartagena prompts the question when he describes his photography as a “search for an understanding of the space where we live” and of “why things look and operate the way they do” (“Beauty”). Of course, the why is crucial, for in mak- ing Carpoolers something more than a document, it urges the beholder to look beyond the surface of the photographic image. But the why is also a problem insofar as it requires Cartagena’s series to compel the conviction that these are not just pictures of individuals laboring under unfavorable conditions, but rather Portions of this essay were presented at the Arts and Sciences Workshop at Harvard Uni- versity’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, at the University of Penn- sylvania’s Department of Hispanic and Portuguese Studies, and at the symposium The Novel and the Concrete, hosted by Novel at Brown University. I am grateful to those who organized and participated in these events and particularly to the editors of Novel for their feedback and comments. Special thanks as well to Alejandro Cartagena for the use of his images. Novel: A Forum on Fiction 51:2 DOI 10.1215/00295132-6846102 Ó 2018 by Novel, Inc. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/novel/article-pdf/51/2/250/539572/250sauri.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA OMAHA user on 17 September 2018