Alec Soth went to Bogotá, Colombia in 2002-3 with his wife to adopt a young girl, Carmen, whose birth mother gave her a scrapbook in which she had written When I think about you I hope that your life is full of beautiful things. It led Soth to try to make a book of beautiful images for his daughter of the city of her birth, ‘Dog Days Bogotá by Alec Soth‘, and in the Boston Globe you can read more about it in a short piece by Mark Feeney. It’s there in the Globe because a show of work from it opened on September 9 and runs until November 28, 2009 at the Stephen D. Paine Gallery of the Massachusetts College of Art & Design (or MassArt.)
Both the paper and the gallery use the same single picture – of a dog looking towards camera on the tip of a hill overlooking the city bathed in bright sunlight, but you can see 49 pictures from the book (half as many again as in the show) on the Magnum site as thumbnails or as a slide album.
Although the Magnum copyright overprinted watermark appearing five times on each image is less obtrusive than some, it is occasionally rather annoying, but even so these images are worth looking at. There are five without this on the Magnum page for the exhibition.