Dog Days, Bogotá

In the book Dog Days Bogotá, photographer Alec Soth wrote the following introduction: “My wife and I adopted our baby girl, Carmen Laura, from Bogotá, Colombia. While the courts processed her paperwork, we spent two months in Bogotá waiting to take Carmen home. Carmen’s birth mother gave her a book filled with letters, pictures and poems. ‘I hope that the hardness of the world will not hurt your sensitivity’, she wrote, ‘When I think about you I hope that your life is full of beautiful things.’ With those words as a mission statement, I began making my own book for Carmen. In photographing the city of her birth, I hope I’ve described some of the beauty in this hard place.”