Sophie Calle

After a discussion with a member of the Royal Standard Group, I came across the artist 'Sophie Calle', whose work and ideas instantly made me relate to my own. Not by how the work appears to the eye but how she thinks and uses her personal experiences and feelings to create the work; inviting the viewer into her own life, as I am trying to do with my own.

Sophie Calle is a French artist who works with photographs and performances, placing herself in situations almost as if she and the people she encounters were fictional. She also imposes elements of her own life onto public places creating a personal narrative where she is both author and character. She has been called a detective and a voyeur and her pieces involve serious investigations as well as natural curiosity.

Putting her own private life on display whilst getting involved in others’ lives, Sophie Calle began by photographing people in the street (Filatures parisiennes, 1978/1979) or sleeping in her bed, including actor Fabrice Luchini (Les Dormeurs, [The Sleepers], 1979). Then she hired a detective to follow her, and afterwards compared his report with her own account in her diary (La Filature [The Shadow], 1981). Since then she has continued to represent and show her own life and the lives of others, making use of chance happenings according to rules she sets herself, in an abundant and multiform body of work, somewhere between the photo-novel, private diary, confession and travel diary.

Calle's work is very much tied up with a process. Her art unfolds as she goes through each stage of preparation and execution. She says that the form of the final product - the thing which the gallery viewer actually sees - is the least significant part.

La Filature - The Shadow
In 'The Shadow', although Sophie Calle knew she would be followed and photographed as she went about her daily life in Paris..."...These works had involved me so much in the act of following that I wanted, in a certain way, to reverse these relationships. So I asked my mother to hire a private detective to follow me, without him knowing that I had arranged it, and to provide photographic evidence of my existence."...She had no idea which day the detective would be following her. She kept an itinerary of her own movements and wrote a description of what happened each day as well as making a series of photographs of what she saw herself. These two contrasting points of view of the same period of time - the detectives' report and photos and her own diary and self-portraits - were exhibited as the final piece of work.

Sophie Calle has often written about her own life as if it were a fictional narrative but she has also been featured as a character and her own art activities have punctuated the narrative in "Leviathan", a novel by American writer Paul Auster.