Art
Jobless, penniless, disorientated and empty, Sophie Calle began following strangers on the streets of Paris in the early spring of 1979 “just to see what people do”. Born out of boredom and alienation, after seven years of restless travelling, this exercise was to become, unbeknownst to Calle, the first baby steps of a thirty year career as an artist, producing provocative, voyeuristic and touching photographic series, books and short films. Now one of France’s most celebrated contemporary figures, with a number of major international shows under her belt including last years’ acclaimed 'Talking to Strangers' at the Whitechapel Gallery, Sophie Calle has recently been named as the winner of the 2010 'Hasselblad Foundation International Award' in photography.
The award is not undeserved, but considering Calle alongside previous winners, many eminent photojournalists (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank), New Topographers (Robert Adams, Bernd & Hilla Becher) or big-budget cinematic art photographers (Jeff Wall), it is curious that she was shortlisted at all. Indeed, the lush large-scale colour images that make up the bulk of Take Care Of Yourself, Calle’s contribution to the 2007 Venice Biennale, are in stark contrast to the grainy, technically flawed black and white images of earlier works such as The Sleepers (1980) and The Hotel (1981), and in fact most of her oeuvre. The quality of these images compared with the often visceral impact of her interventions suggests that Calle’s main concern is not with photography per se. In a 2004 lecture, Calle herself referred to these images as “secondary”, suggesting that they functioned simply to document a process or experience, be that inviting strangers to sleep in her bed or following a man she met at a party to Italy; perhaps attempting modesty, she nonetheless denies the photographs an artistic function by saying “they don’t show much”. Contrarily, in recounting her earliest interventions and experiments on the streets of Paris, Calle claims that she began taking photographs of her oblivious subjects to make the process “more official”, suggesting to me that the camera functioned not just as a means of documentation but also as a suitable accessory furnishing Calle’s assumed role as a super sleuth, the performance at the root of the piece. Hence, the function of the photograph is constantly in flux in Calle’s work, variously promoted and demoted across the line between ‘art’ and ‘documentary’.
Take Care Of Yourself presents a new approach to photography for Calle, and is to my knowledge her first piece to use only full-colour, large format imagery (Exquisite Pain was in colour but was made up of both found imagery and original photographs in a multitude of formats).
Inspired by the closing phrase of an email she received from her lover bringing the relationship to an end, Calle used a technique she had previously employed in Exquisite Pain (2005) of processing her emotion publicly and in a repetitive fashion with the help of collaborators.
She approached 106 women (and a talking parrot) each with their own specialist skill or profession, and asked them to interpret the email according to their own personal talent or ability.
We see translators dissect and transform the text, singers perform it, a criminologist analyse it for clues as to the disposition of the writer and memorably, a rifle shooter pepper it with bullet-holes, in what Jessica Lott describes as “one of the most expansive and telling pieces of art on women and contemporary feminism to pass through (the major art centres) in recent years”.
Each woman’s response is accompanied by a photograph of the woman reading a copy of the email, but these are carefully executed and expertly lit large-format colour images, a world away from the soft focus, poorly exposed and distinctly prosaic (but nonetheless effective) photographs from her work in the 1980’s and 1990’s. Calle has obviously been moved to technically up her game in recent years, consequently raising the profile of her photographic imagery, but in Take Care Of Yourself she successfully manages to maintain equilibrium with the textual element - and primary focus - of the piece, ensuring the bi-linear narrative she is renowned for is refreshed and still as effective.
What Calle’s early work would be if it wasn’t for its photographic content presents some difficult questions. Would it make her books less accessible if it wasn’t for the photographs? Do the photographs make the work ‘art’? Does the performative nature of her work only become valid when reinforced with visual imagery? And so on. Again, we reach the tired debate on the photograph’s function as ‘proof’ in the modern mind. Suffice to say that for me, despite her assertions, Calle’s early voyeuristic tendencies and her exploitation of the conventions of the documentary genre are key to her success as a photographic artist, and I welcome the Hasselblad Foundation’s decision to honour her perhaps unconventional approach to the medium. The image-text discourse of her books and installations, which invoke the scrapbook or family album, display a balance of narrative power rarely seen in other photo-texts, where neither element is auxiliary to the other.
Do I consider Sophie Calle a “photographer”? No. She’s so much more than that, and to consider her work simply in terms of its photographic content means to overlook the way she has so deeply engrained her art in her lifestyle, rarely embarking on projects but stumbling in to them and living through them with a vibrancy and a bravery, even a recklessness, which is nothing if not original. However in utilising photographs and the act of photographing in the way that she does – especially within a constructed or orchestrated scenario - Calle both works with the idea of ‘proof’, whilst in turn questioning the very nature of ‘truth’.
Lillian Wilkie
