Sophie Calle

This volume accompanies the eponymous show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which is the first exhibition in North America to explore the range and depth of artist Sophie Calle’s practice across the past five decades. Through examples of major bodies of work as well as lesser-known pieces, the exhibition captures Calle’s astute probing into the human condition and reveals ways that her early work anticipated the rise of social media as a space to create and share oneself. The presentation features photography, video, installations and text-based works, highlighting the artist’s virtuosic use of different mediums to explore broadly recognizable and emotionally resonant themes. Organized into four thematic sections—“The Spy,” “The Protagonist,” “The End” and “The Beginning”—the book takes a new approach to some of Calle’s most acclaimed works including The Sleepers (1979) and Suite Vénitienne (1980), while also weaving in understudied works including Cash Machine (1991–2003) and Unfinished (2005). The catalog further explores this new examination of Calle's work with original writing by Henriette Huldisch, Eugenie Brinkeman, Aruna D’Souza and Courtenay Finn.
Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. The Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective in 2009, and her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.

In one of Sophie Calle’s first artistic experiments, she invited friends, acquaintances and strangers to sleep in her bed. Twenty-seven people agreed, among them a baker, a babysitter, an actor, a journalist, a seamstress, a trumpet player and three painters. Calle photographed them awake and asleep, secretly recording any private conversations once the door closed. She served each a meal, and, if they agreed, she subjected them to a questionnaire that probed their personal predilections, habits and dreams as well as their interpretations of the act of sleeping in her bed: a curiosity, a game, an artwork, or—as Calle intended it—a job. The result, comprising her first exhibition in 1979, was a grid of 198 photographs and short texts.
Unlike the original installation, this artist’s book version of The Sleepers contains not only all the photographs and captions but also her engrossing, novellalike narrative, untranslated until now. From the single, liminal mise-en-scène of her bedroom, Calle reports in text and photos, as if in real time, as sleepers arrive, talk, sleep, eat and leave. Their acute and sometimes startling, sometimes endearing particularities merge into something almost like an eight-day-long dream. Many seeds of Calle’s subsequent works are embedded in The Sleepers: her exacting and transgressive methods of investigation, her cultivation of intimacy and remove, and her unrelenting curiosity. In this work, as she observes the sleepers, they observe her too—with reciprocal candor. The Sleepers, clothbound and pillow-like, unfolds as it opens, inviting the reader to join the others in Calle’s bed.

Words have always been central to the practice of French artist Sophie Calle (born 1953), who is known for her photographic work that often includes panels of text of her own writing. In this project, Calle conceives of the internal thought processes behind her art-making as stories to be told. It is with these stories—alongside the external stories of the moments preceding a click of a camera shutter—that Calle opens Because. The volume chronicles her reasons behind capturing particular moments in time, but the corresponding photos themselves are revealed only later, hidden in the interstices of the Japanese binding. In this process, Calle reverses the relationship of natural primacy between an image and the words that accompany it, instead calling our attention to the influence that the latter may have on our perception of a photograph.
The new revised edition of this classic artist’s book contains 39 loose photographs inserted between the pages, alongside text and other imagery by Calle. A beautiful object in its own right, it features Japanese binding and an iridescent orange cloth cover.

First published in 1994 and regularly reissued and expanded since, this new edition of True Stories returns with three new stories. Calle’s projects have frequently drawn on episodes from her own life, but this book—part visual memoir, part meditation on the resonances of photographs and belongings—is as close as she has come to producing an autobiography, albeit one highly poetical and fragmentary, as is characteristic of her work. The tales—never longer than a page—are by turns lighthearted, humorous, serious, dramatic or cruel. Each is accompanied by an image; each offers a fragment of life. Calle herself is the author, narrator and protagonist of her stories and photography. Her words are somber, chosen precisely and carefully. She offers up her own memories—childhood, marriage, sex and death—with brilliant humor, insight and pleasure. By turns serious, hilarious, dramatic or cruel, these real-life stories represent a form of work in progress recounting fragments of her life.
Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Hayward Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.

In 1981 Sophie Calle took a job as a chambermaid for the Hotel C in Venice, Italy. Stashing her camera and tape recorder in her mop bucket, she not only cleans and tidies, but sorts through the evidence of the hotel guests' lives. Assigned 12 rooms on the fourth floor, she surveys the state of the guests' bedding, their books, newspapers and postcards, perfumes and cologne, traveling clothes and costumes for Carnival. She methodically photographs the contents of closets and suitcases, examining the detritus in the rubbish bin and the toiletries arranged on the washbasin. She discovers their birth dates and blood types, diary entries, letters from and photographs of lovers and family. She eavesdrops on arguments and love-making. She retrieves a pair of shoes from the wastebasket and takes two chocolates from a neglected box of sweets, while leaving behind stashes of money, pills and jewelry. Her thievery is the eye of the camera, observing the details that were not meant for her, or us, to see.
The Hotel now manifests as a book for the first time in English (it was previously included in the book Double Game). Collaborating with the artist on a new design that features enhanced and larger photographs, and pays specific attention to the beauty of the book as an object, Siglio is releasing its third book authored by Calle, after The Address Book (2012) and Suite Vénitienne (2015).
Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. The Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective in 2009, and her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.

First published in French in 1994, quickly acclaimed as a photobook classic and since republished and enhanced, True Stories returns for the sixth time, gathering a series of short autobiographical texts and photos by acclaimed French artist Sophie Calle, this time with four new tales. Calle's projects have frequently drawn on episodes from her own life, but this book—part visual memoir, part meditation on the resonances of photographs and belongings—is as close as she has come to producing an autobiography, albeit one highly poetical and fragmentary, as is characteristic of her work. The tales—never longer than a page—are by turns lighthearted, humorous, serious, dramatic or cruel. Each is accompanied by an image; each offers a fragment of life.

The slim, portable volume is divided into sections: the first is composed of various reflections on objects such as a shoe, a postcard or "the breasts"; the second, "The Husband," of recollections of episodes from Calle's first marriage; and the third gathers a variety of autobiographical recollections. Calle herself is the author, narrator and protagonist of her stories and photography; her words are somber, chosen precisely and carefully. One of the 21st century's foremost artists, Calle here offers up her own story—childhood, marriage, sex, death—with brilliant humor, insight and pleasure.

“She was called successively Rachel, Monique, Szyndler, Calle, Pagliero, Gonthier, Sindler,” reads the first lines of Sophie Calle: Rachel Monique, embroidered on the cover. “My mother liked people to talk about her. Her life did not appear in my work, and that annoyed her. When I set up my camera at the bottom of the bed in which she lay dying—fearing that she would pass away in my absence, whereas I wanted to be present and hear her last words—she exclaimed, ‘Finally.’”

Sophie Calle: Rachel Monique tells the story of Monique Szyndler, Sophie Calle’s mother who died in 2007, through diary excerpts and photographs selected by the artist from family albums. Described as “haunting” and “a mystery novel that tirelessly searches for a missing person,” the Rachel Monique project honors a daughter’s complicated relationship with her mother and the artist’s deeply felt grief.

This volume, presenting Calle’s installation of Rachel Monique at the Palais de Tokyo, was designed in close collaboration with the artist. The cover text is embroidered to create a precious object, and all of the texts relating to the installation are beautifully embossed. Sophie Calle: Rachel Monique is a highly personal and moving book, intimate and universal in its expressions of mourning and memory.

First published in French in 1994, quickly acclaimed as a photobook classic and since republished and enhanced, True Stories returns for the fifth time, gathering a series of short autobiographical texts and photos by acclaimed French artist Sophie Calle, this time with four new tales. Calle’s projects have frequently drawn on episodes from her own life, but this book--part visual memoir, part meditation on the resonances of photographs and belongings--is as close as she has come to producing an autobiography, albeit one highly poetical and fragmentary, as is characteristic of her work. The tales--never longer than a page--are by turns lighthearted, humorous, serious, dramatic or cruel. Each is accompanied by an image; each offers a fragment of life.

The slim, portable volume is divided into sections: the first is composed of various reflections on objects such as a shoe, a postcard or “the breasts”; the second, “The Husband,” of recollections of episodes from Calle’s first marriage; and the third gathers a variety of autobiographical recollections. Calle herself is the author, narrator and protagonist of her stories and photography; her words are somber, chosen precisely and carefully. One of the 21st century’s foremost artists, Calle here offers up her own story--childhood, marriage, sex, death--with brilliant humor, insight and pleasure.

Sophie Calle (born 1953) creates controversial works exploring the tensions between the observed, the reported, the secret and the unsaid. She has mounted solo shows at major museums across the world and represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2007.