This Week's Photo
'The Hotel'
Sophie Calle
Sophie Calle (born 1953) is a French writer, photographer, installation artist and conceptual artist.
Calle's work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement of the 1960s known as Oulipo.
Her work frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy.
She is recognized for her detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives.
Her photographic work often includes panels of text of her own writing.
Calle began working as an artist in the 1970s, after traveling the world for seven years.
When she returned to Paris, the city in which she was born, she recalls feeling isolated and lost; this isolation inspired her to investigate the lives of the people around her. Her first photographs were of graves marked simply mother and father.
Although much of her work employs voyeurism, Calle has allowed her own life to be put on display as well.
She became so intrigued by following her unwitting subjects that she wanted to reverse the relationship, and become the subject herself.
She asked her mother to hire a private detective to follow her, without the detective knowing that she had arranged it, with the hopes that his investigation would provide photographic evidence of her existence.
In order to execute her project The Hotel (1983), she was hired as a chambermaid at a hotel in Venice where she was able to explore the writings and objects of the hotel guests.
Insight into her process and its resulting aesthetic can be gained through her account of this project: "I 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."
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