In 2016, a French newspaper asked Alejandro Cartagena to photograph the idea of the journey in the 21st century. He had spent almost ten years making the hour-and-a-half commute from downtown Monterrey to the suburbs, so he found a bus company running between Monterrey and Juárez and rode its buses for two days with his camera. He came back with 3,000 images.

For the first Suburban Bus (2021), Cartagena and his editor Fernando Gallegos chose 600 of them and printed them in the order he took them. The book was shortlisted for the Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Awards and sold out. After his mid-career retrospective Ground Rules at SFMOMA, Cartagena went back to the project. Suburban Bus Archives uses all 3,000 photographs from those two days, in chronological order. Good and bad images sit side by side, and no single picture is meant to stand out. Cartagena describes it like this:

"It's about the sensation of traveling from one place to another and seeing every single moment of that trajectory. The journey becomes a sort of visual texture, a blur." It is a book you go through the way you ride a bus. On page 20 you realise there are 100 pages left, and you start to feel the same dread a long commute gives you. That, he says, is the point. Monterrey's bus fleet has shrunk by 30 percent in five years. Most riders wait more than 20 minutes for a bus, and crashes and robberies happen every day. Decision-makers who drive their own cars rarely see any of this. Cartagena's work makes daily public transport, and what it costs the people who depend on it, impossible to ignore.