Sophie Calle

born 1953 in Paris. In her conceptual and poetic works, Sophie Calle consciously conceals the borders between art and life, fiction and reality, and between the private and public. With self-established behavioral instructions and rituals, she transforms her daily life with a series of performances, usually executed as a combination of texts and photographs. She acts as the pursuer (La Suite Venétienne [The Venetien Suite], 1983), as the voyeur (Les Dormeurs [The Sleepers], 1980; L’Hôtel, 1981 [published 1984 as a book]), or places herself directly under observation (The Shadow, 1981; 20 Years later, 2001). In the case of her photographs, which operate as pieces of evidence for heightening the authenticity of told stories, Calle experiments with different forms of photographic documentation: street photography, scene-of-the-crime photography, reproduction work connected with scientific research, archival specimen photography, and the imagery of automatic surveillance cameras. In spite of this collection of photographic circumstantial evidence, the stories are ambivalent, and texts and images alternatingly refer to one another while the status of their reality remains uncertain.