Background

Sophie Calle was born on October 9, 1953, in Paris, France. She is the daughter of Robert Calle, a renowned French oncologist, and Monique Sindler, a book critic and press attaché.

Education

Born into a family of an oncologist who was a celebrated art collector and a center stage mother, Sophie Calle was raised into an uncommon atmosphere. The non-observance of social and personal boundaries has reflected in Calle's further art.

Calle didn't attend the art school. She took lessons from philosopher, sociologist, and photographer Jean Baudrillard. After finishing school, Sophie Calle traveled around China, Mexico, and the United States for seven years.

While in California, she developed an interest in photography. Upon her return to France in 1979, she enrolled at photography classes which she soon dropped out however unsatisfied with its approach.

Career

Sophie Calle emerged to the art scene at the end of the 1970s.

Since her early projects, she has shocked art community by the unconventional approach to photography consisting of ignoring private life and social boundaries. One of the first examples of the stalker-like method that she often used in many works of that time was a series of photos Suite Venitienne. To realize the project, Calle followed a stranger man she came across in Paris on his way to Venice documenting all his public moves as a detective. The resulted series was composed of black and white photos accompanied by text like many of her subsequent works.

Another project of the time, 1979 Les Dormeurs (The Sleepers), that became her first major work, was as much controversial as the venetian surveillance. Sophie Calle invited 29 different persons, from her friends to strangers, to spent eight hours in her bed. The stories they told were used as a textual support of the pictures that Calle took of them every hour. The Sleepers was first presented to the public at the Biennale des Jeunes in 1980.

Within the course of time, Calle's works became more and more controversial. In 1983, she realized the Address Book project in which she used an address book accidentally found on the street. The photographer had conversations, often unpleasant, with several people randomly chosen from that book and created the portraits of these people basing on the conversations' transcripts. After the publication of the project in one of the French periodicals, Sophie Calle received many threats of suing including from the owner of the address book who classified it as the unauthorized intrusion in his private life. Another notable project of the time was the Blind composed of the combination of photos of blind people, their opinions on what the beauty is in a textual form and Calle's visual interpretations of their answers.

In 1996, Calle collaborated with an American photographer and director Gregory Shephard on a movie No Sex Last Night. The picture chronicled their common trip around the United States with a target point in a Las Vegas wedding chapel. One more unstandard collaboration of that time, with writer and film director Paul Auster, resulted in Calle's Double Game and The Gotham Handbook publications.

The 2002 was marked by Calle's first retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Her Room with a View during which she stayed overnight at the top of the Eiffel Tower listening to the bedtime stories from different people dated to the same time.

Three years later, Calle joined the staff of the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland where she has taught film and photography since then. Other educational appointments of the artist include the University of California, San Diego and Mills College in Oakland, California.

Sophie Calle has participated in many solo and group exhibitions worldwide throughout her career, including a 2007 Venice Biennale where she realized a piece from her Take Care of Yourself project based on the last phrase from the break-up letter that she had received from her boyfriend. Three years later, the Whitechapel Gallery hosted the next major retrospective of Calle's works.

Nowadays, Sophie Calle lives and works in Paris. She revises the projects from previous years and puts her new unvarnished thoroughgoing ideas into practice.

Achievements

• 

  Having a reputation of a controversial artist, Sophie Calle is considered one of the most influential representatives of conceptual art in Europe.
  
  Calle’s provocative projects relying on detective-like methods has influenced the art of other conceptualists who try to rethink the role of the artist through their works, including Chris Kraus, Tracey Emin, and Amalia Ulman. The questions about the role of a woman that Calle often touches resonate with the works of Adrian Piper and Carolee Schneemann.
  
  Calle is a recipient of Hasselblad Award, the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, and the Centenary Medal from the Royal Photographic Society. In 2017, My All book by Calle provided her with the nomination for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize.
  
  "The Sleepers" by Sophie Calle was purchased for $218,500 at Christie's in New York City in 2011.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Sophie Calle: Did You See Me?

    (The book presents Calle's best-known works, including "Th...)

    2004
  • Sophie Calle: Take Care of Yourself

    (In this remarkable artist's book, French conceptual artis...)

    2007
  • Que faites-vous de vos morts?

    (The French edition of the book is comprised of the photos...)

    2019
  • My All

    (Taking stock of her entire oeuvre, this set of postcards ...)

    2016
  • Suite Vénitienne

    (The first artist's book and the crucible of her inimitabl...)

    1988
  • The Address Book

    (The Address Book, a key and controversial work in Sophie ...)

    2012
  • Sophie Calle: Blind 2011

• photography

  • Sophie Calle: True Stories

    (First published in French in 1994, the book returns for t...)

    1994

Views

Quotations: "I'm not obsessive, but I am rigorous. If I have decided that there is this rule or that rule then I am very committed. I don't get bored. I think I have an ability because I believe in the construction of the idea."

"Establishing rules and following them is restful. If you follow someone, you don't have to wonder where you're going to eat. They take you to their restaurant. The choice is made for you."

"I like being in control and I like losing control. Following the rules of others is restful. A way not to have to think – to be trapped in a game and to follow it."

"I don't think I'm revealing anything personal in a way. [...] So in many of those stories, they are one moment – as I said –they are not my life. They are one minute of an event that I select. I never feel I am revealing anything. No. People think they know me. But they know nothing."

Personality

Sophie Calle's hobby is to collect taxidermy animals and Victorian photographs of babies.

Angelique Chrisafis named Calle "the Marcel Duchamp of emotional dirty laundry" in the Guardian.

Quotes from others about the person

• "She uses photography in unique ways – no one else works with photography/text in this outstandingly original way – and she is a constant source of inspiration to younger generations of conceptually working artists." Hasselblad Foundation
  
  "Even Taylor Swift's boyfriend-dishing pop songs owe something to Calle. Consciously or not, her influence is everywhere." Mary Kaye Schilling, journalist

Interests

• Artists

  Duane Michals

Connections

Sophie Calle has a boyfriend and has no children.

Father:

Robert Calle

Mother:

Monique Calle

mentor:

Jean Baudrillard

colleague:

Gregory Shephard