Alec Soth's "Dog Days, Bogotá"

Art Dogs is a weekly dispatch introducing the pets—dogs, yes!, but also cats, lizards, marmosets, and more—that were kept by our favorite artists. Subscribe to receive these weekly posts to your email inbox.

Alec Soth at home with Mushroom (“Misha”)

Alec Soth (

Little Brown Mushroom

) may be the greatest living American photographer. He’s a member of Magnum, has received a slew of prestigious fellowships, and has work in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, and more.

New York Times art critic Hilarie M. Sheets has said that Alec Soth has made a “photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers” and excels at capturing “loners and dreamers.” The Guardian art critic Hannah Booth described Alec Soth’s photographs as “off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America.”

Joshua, Angola State Prison, LA, 2002 from Sleeping by the Mississippi

Crystal, Easter, New Orleans, Louisiana 2002 from Sleeping by the Mississippi

Patrick, Palm Sunday. Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA. 2002 from Sleeping by the Mississippi

His first book, a self-printed series called Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published in 2004 and drew wide acclaim, changing the trajectory of Alec’s life. (He described himself as a “complete nobody” before the book came out.¹) It includes both landscapes and portraits that Alec Soth shot over the course of five years worth of car trips along the famed river.

The book established his reputation as “a skilled chronicler of American life in the tradition of photographers like Walker Evans and Robert Frank.”² After seeing a copy of Sleeping by the Mississippi, curators for the 2004 Whitney Biennial put him in the show, an “avalanche” of press coverage followed, as did a more professional run of the book by Steidl and representation from Gagosian Gallery. Today, first edition copies of the book sell for thousands of dollars.

Alec carrying his large format camera, from the documentary Somewhere to Disappear (2010) by Laure Flammerion and Arnaud Uyttenhove.

To create his images, Alec will pick a spot on the map using random chance and drive there for the day to hunt for strangers to photograph. Sometimes he’ll do several drive bys of a potential scene or person before striking up a conversation. Here’s Alec Soth describing his approach with subjects:

“It’s the bird flying around that swoops down and grabs the worm and then flies off. But I have good intentions, and people very often enjoy that interaction. It’s almost like, finally, someone showed up and we can talk.”

…

“I’m famous for sweating when I photograph people, which doesn’t seem to happen when I’m photographing landscapes. My own awkwardness comforts people, I think. It’s part of the exchange.”

It can take up to 20 minutes for Alec to set his large-format 8-by-10 view camera up. “It isn’t that thing where you pull out a small camera and people get nervous,” Alec Soth told The New York Times. Subsequently, his subjects “[wait] around long enough that they settle a bit.” Each 8-by-10-inch negative plate costs $20, so he often doesn’t shoot more than two frames in a session.

Four years into his trips to photograph people along the Mississippi river, when he was still, in own his words, a “complete nobody,” Alec Soth packed his camera for a journey to Colombia. The goal of this trip wasn’t to take photographs, however. He and his wife, Rachel, were there to adopt a daughter, Carmen Laura, and spent two months in Bogotá waiting for the courts to process her paperwork.

Carmen’s birthmother had created a gift for her daughter: a book for her filled with letters, pictures and poems. Inside, Alec found the message: “I hope that the hardness of the world will not hurt your sensitivity. When I think about you I hope that your life is full of beautiful things.”³

Inspired, Alec set out to make Carmen a book as well—one that captured the beauty of her hometown despite all of its hardness. He called the project Dog Days, Bogotá and assembled the photos into a book. Here are some of the 49 photographs.

Interviewer: What message are you trying to get across with your photographs?

Alec Soth: It’s not a message. That’s the thing that’s always hard to explain. It’s closer to poetry.

Given this newsletter is called Art Dogs, I’m guessing your eyeballs may be pulled to the gorgeous dogs in these images. Many of the 49 photographs, including the cover image, are of an hombre’s best friend.

But there’s something else I want to call your attention to. This Dog Days, Bogotá photo book Alec made for Carmen predates the publishing of Sleeping by the Mississippi by a year. At the time Alec decided to create this booklet of images for his daughters, Sleeping by the Mississippi wasn’t yet a photo book—it was a slew of images from four years worth of wandering trips.

Publishing Sleeping by the Mississippi as a poetic 46-image photo book would change Alec Soth’s professional life. The photo book is perhaps the ideal vessel for his artwork. His photos pair beautifully with poetic excerpts and linear pages. He followed Sleeping by the Mississippi with a number of similarly formatted projects, including Niagara (2008) and Songbook (2015). But I wonder if Alec Soth’s books, which are surely masterpieces, might have existed or taken the same form if it wasn’t for Carmen’s birth mother’s simple creative act.

In 2013, ten years after adopting Carmen, Alec, Rachel, Carmen and their seven-year old son Gus traveled back to Bogotá for the first time. This trip they all used disposable cameras to take photographs, and together they made a new book: Bogotá Funsaver.

Only 500 copies were ever printed, and yes, of the 14 photographs, quite a few are of dogs.

Alec and Misha at home

Carmen and Gus were raised in St. Paul, Minnesota, near where Alec was also born and raised. Alec chose to remain there even though it likely limited his artistic opportunities. Until a year and a half ago, the family lived with a Labradoodle named Mushroom, or “Misha” for short. (Alec shared with me that her nose looked like a mushroom, hence the name.)

If you appreciate Alec Soth’s work, you’ll know that his publishing company and small experimental arts institution is named “Little Brown Mushroom.” He created the company the year the family adopted Misha, who is also its namesake. (His Instagram username is @littlebrownmushroom and his Substack is

Little Brown Mushroom

, too.)

Misha made many playful appearances on Alec’s Instagram.

As LBM, Alec publishes his own books, and that of other like-minded people. He told The Guardian:

“I decided to use Little Brown Mushroom as a way to publish narrative photography books that function in a similar way to children's books. We've since done four of these books… Little Brown Mushroom isn't a real business. It is a hobby. My only goal is to satisfy my own particular interest at a given time."

Perhaps Dog Days, St. Paul, is Little Brown Mushroom’s next photo book.

Us Art Dogs can only hope.

Bonus

In the video below, Alec’s young son Gus interviews him about his decision to become an artist.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/arts/design/02shee.html

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/lens/a-year-of-quiet-contemplation-led-to-the-rebirth-of-alec-soths-photography.html

3. https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/alec-soth-dog-days-bogota/?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiAmsurBhBvEiwA6e-WPB12NqMksDT66OvN9rabXdFPnPDAmadgRt2s6EjG5LvtYMS84pVCqhoC_dQQAvD_BwE