Tumblr Image Viewer
-
Sophie Calle began following strangers because she didn’t know what to do with herself; she had no friends. “It was a way to force myself to get out of the house without having to decide what I was doing.”
January 1980 in Paris, she followed a man for the day and then lost him in the crowd. She later attended an art exhibition to find him there, she believed this was fate. She overheard him talking to a friend about a holiday to Venice and decided to go to track him down. She phoned hundreds of hotels and finally found the man.
She began to follow him every day, photographing him, writing down his every move with her thoughts and feelings and kept them in a journal. If he stopped to take a photo, she would go to take exact spot to try and capture the same image he had taken. She became obsessed with this man, she would often think and dream about him. When he would leave a hotel, she would book out the exact same room, just so she could sleep in the same bed he was in. Her work is more similar to a detective’s than a lover, she highlights the vulnerability of the stranger as she tries to examine his identity.
After following a subject something within her just clicks, and she decides she must leave them behind, forget about them, and move on.
This project lead her into another, she requested her mother to hire a private investigator to follow her. She took him on a journey through the streets of Paris to her favourite places. She kept a journal of the things she was up to, to compare with the detectives notes for her amusement. She was intrigued with the idea of switching roles and her privacy being invaded, like the many that she had once followed, and the contrast of the scenarios the detective pieced together from following her, to the actual truth.
-
The Sleepers (Les Dormeurs), detail
Courtesy of Sophie Calle and Centre Pompidou
The Sleepers is Sophie Calle’s first fully realized installation consisting of 173 photographs and 23 explanatory texts (6 x 8 inches/15.2 x 20.3 cm each photo and text unit) that document a series of situations orchestrated by Calle, in which people (friends, neighbors, strangers) allowed her to observe them as they slept. She photographed and interviewed these people - each of whom was allotted one eight-hour sleeping period in Calle’s own bed - over the course of an entire week.
Such behavior, which might have seemed intimate or slightly titillating if photographed in a single episode, becomes, when it is repeated twenty three times, of little more interest than a clinical record. Although captured in the midst of their “deepest” reveries, the subjects’ psychological states remain inaccessible to Calle’s observation and to the viewer’s gaze. Like Andy Warhol’s minimalist films, Sleep, Eat, and Kiss, Calle’s representations of the human body are aggressively anti-romantic.
Courtesy of University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive
-
-
vespertyne-deactivated20130925:
Flickr.
-
-
Victoria Falls
-
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders
-
David Rabinowitch, Plan of 4 masses II (1968-69)
-
Lucio Fontana
Teatrino bianco III, 1968 -
Eva Hesse with a rope sculpture
Hermann Landshoff c.1969
-
tree climber
-
Robert Rauschenberg - Mud Dauber, from Rookery Mounds series, 1979
-
Waxed concrete bowls by Philippe Malouin for Dezeen
-
-
-
-
-
-
Stella Tennant in “Talking to Myself,” Yohji Yamamoto (2002)
-
-
-
Loriel Beltran
-
-
Didn’t know that this was happening! Thanks Paul!! :D
Stoked to be part of the upcoming Sraunus in Gothenburg, thanks Paul Paper!
-
issey miyake spring summer 1985
-
Photograph of a copy of DDDDoomed, Or, Collectors & Curators of the Image - A Brief Future History of the Image Aggregator by R. Gerald Nelson unopened, published on Tumblr for online distribution by artist, also entitled, “set it free” 2011
“And as if each viewer’s history and state of mind were not already enough to drastically scramble any possibility of an image being interpreted in a manner that was intended by its creator; the always-altering and heterogeneous environments of the Internet had made it even more exponentially possible for an image’s meaning to be (mis)translated in ways that were never imagined by the image’s creator.” p. 33
reblogged on Tumblr 445 times, where the title of the book, author and quotation were removed by users in the process. -
Wrapped Book | Christo
-
my studio as described by a reflective surface (behind view)
-
my studio as described by a reflective surface
-
Lygia Clark - Caranguejo - 1963
