Alexander Iglesias was born in Florida in 2001. They moved around the United States several times before settling in Chattanooga, Tennessee at the age of 13. Soon after, Alexander started making photographs of their friends and their own experience of the American south. Alexander went to the Rochester Institute of Technology, graduating with their BFA in 2024. They have been recognized as a noteworthy emerging artist, being included in the 2024 Lenscratch Student Prize Top 20 list, accepted into Atelier Smedsby, listed in the 39th edition of the American Photography Archive, and more.
Alexander’s practice is personal in approach and utilizes photographs and text the way one would in a diary. Their work is characterized by its transparency, yet is shaped by personal experience and baggage. Their long-term project and graduation exhibition, I Love It Here, I Hate It Here, exemplifies this approach with Alexander’s depiction of growing up in Tennessee.
Many of Alexander’s friends struggled with drug addiction, severe mental health issues, and difficult family dynamics. Alexander was one of a handful of people they know to leave the area. Over the years, Alexander would reconnect with old friends, photograph them, and write on the experience. These photographs and writings were combined with work from their high school years to form a diary that spans multiple phases of their life.
The work was presented in their graduation show in Rochester, New York. Original polaroids were hung with ephemera and photographs with writing on the wall strewn throughout the gallery in a way reminiscent of Grafitti.
Alexander now lives and works in Oakland, California.
