The address book lying flat on the street in Paris in ‘83 would have looked rather ordinary to Calle. As the accidental passerby, she picked it up and flicked through the creased handwritten pages. Within a couple of months this particular lost item would spark a controversy in the French media. Although Calle had quickly - and anonymously - returned the address book to its rightful owner, she happened to make a copy of it beforehand, and went on a covert mission to find out more about the man who owned it. In the days that followed, friends and acquaintances listed in the little book were contacted by Calle and invited to give an insight, perhaps even reveal a few anecdotes about the man. Material she used to build a portrait about its owner, Pierre Baudry. The newspaper, Libération, loved the idea and in a series of 28 articles, the French public could follow the slow assassination of Mr Baudry’s character. Less excited was the man who had his life exposed. Lawsuits flew between one article and the next, with some communication rumoured to include a nude photo of Calle. Any less would have been a disappointment to her.

Intruding into another person’s intimate sphere wasn’t a first for Calle. As a young artist, one of her first projects developed by following a man to Venice after randomly meeting him at a party in Paris. On arrival in Venice she adapted into different characters, disguising herself to be able to get close and take photos of him as he did his errands or met with people. Back in Paris, her fuzzy black-and-white photographs were accompanied by text of her own writing, mixing the factual perspective of a complete stranger with her personal observations. ‘Suite Vénitienne’ quickly rose to one of Calle’s celebrated photographic diaries.

The artist’s forays into the unknown - constructed from a random encounter, a photograph or an object, and then pairing it with a text - would become the centre of Calle’s practice.

Calle’s fascination with writing and storytelling came naturally to her during her childhood. Her father, Robert Calle, was a keen collector of contemporary art, and his passion for art later landed him a position as the director of the new museum Carré d’art in Nimes, France. Born in ’53, Sophie Calle grew up in a time of change as the European continent was in the process of recovery after the Second World War. Everywhere, new political fractions and art movements were surfacing. Some art movements were a reflection of what the world had experienced, and others were critically commenting on the consumerism that followed. Common for all was the general acceptance that there were few creative constraints. In the sixties, a new movement came to light. This faction of artists, defined as the conceptualists, focused on the concept or idea behind what they produced, rather than the material or aesthetics of their work. By the time Calle was showing her first projects in the late 70’s, conceptualism was flourishing and came to inspire several movements, including artists such as Dennis Oppenheim, who pioneered the Land Art movement in the 70’s; Robert Longo and fellow artists of The Pictures Generation in the 80’s in New York; and the YBA’s, like Damien Hirst, in London in the 90’s.

In 1994, Calle released her book ‘True Stories’, an autobiographical book filled with objects and personal moments of her life. As with almost all of the artist’s works, each glimpse contained simply a photo paired with a text. Some are emotional and deeply existential as in ‘Obituary’ describing the last moments of her friend Monique; others life-affirming, light-hearted or as mundane as a coffee cup.

One story, Red Shoe, is humorous and simultaneously bringing about a nostalgic flashback. In the photo, Calle displays ten objects in what looks like a cabinet with glass shelves. However, amongst the other decorative objects, one is not entirely fitting into the scene. A single red shoe. Calle enlightens the viewer in the writing below the photo:

“Amelie and I were eleven years old. We had a habit of stealing from department stores on Thursday afternoons. We did this for one year. When her mother began to suspect, in order to frighten us, she said that a policeman had spotted us and reported our activities to her. But because of our age, he was giving us a second chance. He would now follow us, and if we stop stealing, he would forget about the past. In the following weeks, we spent most of our time wondering who the policeman hidden among all the people around us was. In our attempts to lose him, we were now too busy to steal. Our last robbery had been a pair of red shoes too big for us to wear. Amelie kept the right shoe, and I kept the left.”

Reading the text, the photograph is gradually filled with meaning, and the red shoe changes its nature from a piece of footwear to a trophy. Calle delightfully balances on a knife-edge between truth and fiction in this work, leaving the viewer to speculate if the other objects too are ill-gotten treasures from her heists with Amelie.

Whatever topic or angle that catches Calle’s attention, there is a connection between the past and present in both subject and format. The reflections on her personal life in ‘True Stories’ - by oversharing personal instants through pairing images and short texts - give thoughts to today’s media landscape that have come to sabotage the lives of most people a decade later. And in more recent series, such as ‘On The Hunt’ (2020), the artist delightfully displays dating ads from a French hunting magazine from 1895 to 2019. It is projects like these that show Calle’s actuality and keeps the artist ever-so relevant today.

The works and exposés by Sophie Calle have continuously intrigued the audience ever since she covertly strolled the streets of Venice in ’79 in research of her first established project ‘Suite Vénitienne’. Five decades on, an extensive list of book publications, international group and solo shows, and the inclusion of her multidisciplinary project, ‘Take Care of Yourself’ at the Venice Biennale in 2007, are testament to her contribution, placing her as a key artist within conceptual art. The artist’s works can be found in collections such as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate, London; The Guggenheim, The Metropolitan and MoMA, New York. Today, Calle is a teaching professor in film and photography at the European Graduate School (EGS) in Switzerland.

First presented in her acclaimed book from 1994, and later part of the solo exhibition at Rotterdam's Boymans-van Beuningan Museum, the two print editions, Red Shoe and ‘Coffee Cup’, were released in an exclusive collaboration between Sophie Calle and Eyestorm in 2000. Notably the first signed editions by Calle, the editions of 125 are printed as iris prints on Cream Arche paper, signed and numbered in pencil on verso.

Sophie Calle’s latest solo show ‘Something Missing?’ is currently showing at the Louisiana Museum, just north of Copenhagen, Denmark. []

To view the two print editions in further detail and to find more information about the works, visit Sophie Calle’s artist page here.