Sophie Calle | Photographing the Unobserved

Born in Paris in 1953, controversial artist Sophie Calle employs any means necessary to find adequate methods of self-expression. Famous for her unique observational tactics and outright invasion of her subjects’ privacy, Calle has pushed past the social and formal boundaries of photography in order to fully explore identity. We find out more about the life and work of Sophie Calle, identifying her artistic influences and discovering her impact on narrative photography.
“What Do You See ? The Concert. Vermeer.”, (detail) , 2013, Colour photograph, text, frames (plexiglass and metal frames) 68 x 101 cm / 26 3/4 x 39 3/4 inches (each, photo and text) | ©Adagp, Paris, 2013, Courtesy Galerie Perrotin
Sophie Calle can best be described as a conceptual artist, as her work inhabits the space between fact and fiction: the artist fabricates situations and places herself within them in order to follow them through to the end and observe what has been created in her wake. Her finished artworks are inextricably bound to the processes involved in their creation and thus it is ideas, rather than aesthetics, which take precedent.
Her project ‘The Hotel’ (1983) highlights this commitment to the concept: arising from Calle’s journey to Venice, ‘The Hotel’ is a no-holds-barred observational study of unsuspecting hotel guests, achieved by Calle concealing herself as the chambermaid. With access to twelve guest bedrooms, she built up an idea of each individual by photographing their possessions, reading their letters and diaries, and even going through their rubbish bins. Her penchant for the fusion of fact and fiction becomes apparent, as in each piece of work she infuses real, tangible objects – such as photographs and snippets of text – with her own personal interpretation. Calle states:
‘For ‘The Hotel’ I spent one year to find the hotel [sic], I spent three months going through the text and writing it, I spent three months going through the photographs and I spent one day deciding it would be this size and this frame…it’s the last thought in the process’.
Gathering the wealth of material in front of her, the only aesthetic consideration for Calle was simply how to best display the findings of this project. The result was 22 two-part framed works, one frame displaying photographic prints and the other an image of each bed’s headboard and a passage of accompanying text. An excerpt from ‘The Hotel, Room 30’ reads:
‘Wednesday March 4, 1981. 11:20a.m. I go into room 30. Only one bed has been slept in, the one on the right. There is a small bag on the luggage stand. A beautifully ironed silk nightgown lies on the chair that has been pulled up near the bed: it clearly has never been worn. Everything else is still in the traveling bag’
This showcases Calle’s disregard for privacy, the absent individual merely providing the tools with which she paints a picture in her mind.