Sophie Calle French, b. 1953
Sophie Calle works with photography, writing, film, and installation, drawing on private experience and encounters with strangers. Following people through city streets, documenting hotel rooms, or recounting a personal loss, she makes observation itself part of the story. Her projects leave the boundaries between evidence, invention, and intimacy deliberately unsettled.
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Untitled, 1983
Born 1953, Paris, France; lives in Paris.
Sophie Calle is a writer, photographer, director, and conceptual artist, who holds the belief that life itself is a piece of art. She has had no formal training and first began working as an artist in the 1970s.
Calle notes feelings of isolation as the inspiration for her first conceptual project. She began to follow, photograph, investigate, and reconstruct the lives of strangers, embarking on a conceptual project that bordered on voyeurism. Evoking the 1960s literary movement Oulipo, she creates works under an arbitrary set of rules and constraints.
Calle investigates human identity, vulnerability, and intimacy. Her varied work has explored the relationships between subject and object, fact and fiction, and public and private. She is interested in the role of the spectator and has gone as far to put her own life on display.
Sophie Calle's work has been shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the 2007 Venice Biennale. Calle has been included in exhibitions at the Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among others.