The Early Works of Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle spent seven years traveling after she completed her schooling in Paris, France. When she returned, she sought to rediscover the area by stalking and photographing locals, learning about their lives and daily habits in the process. Her first book, Suite Venitienne,  Please Follow me was the result of her following a man from Paris to Venice for 12 days, photographing him in the process. According to her, “At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him.” (source) The man is known only as Henri B. and the work is presented as a diary with pictures to accompany her description of the subject and his activities. At one point, she even attempted to rent the room he vacated in order to sleep in the same bed. (source)

Images from Suite Venitienne (1980) by Sophie Calle

One of Calle's next works, The Shadow (1981) continued to explore the theme of watching and being watched. She asked her mother to hire a private detective to follow her and document her activities, although she didn't know which days he would be doing so. For several days, she recorded her own movements and activities and walked to places around Paris that held deep meaning for her, effectively leading the detective and reversing their roles. The final exhibit included the detective's observations as well as her own, inviting onlookers to compare and contrast their respective recordings. Calle essentially made herself a victim of the stalking activity she had inflicted on somebody else, making a keen observation about the role of the spectator and further exploring an idea she would continue to touch on throughout her career.

Images taken of Sophie Calle for The Shadow (1981) by Sophie Calle 

Clearly, Calle's work so deeply involved invading the lives of others that it bordered on illegal. This is due partially to her efforts to understand the city she had left for so long, which is especially clear in the execution of her next project, The Hotel (1981). This involved taking a temporary job as a chambermaid at a hotel and photographing the personal belongings of several occupants. According to her, she "spent one year to find the hotel, 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." (source) Along with the photos, she included descriptions of what she imagined the guests' lives were like based on the personal items she found. 

Images from L'hotel (1981) by Sophie Calle

It's difficult to imagine any of these pieces coming to fruition today, as everyone records their lives and travels so thoroughly that Sophie's deception and subsequent documentation of personal goods would have been discovered fairly quickly. Calle truly pushed the limits of what she could get away with, especially with a piece that will be discussed in my next blog post.