Stalker or Artist?

Sophie Calle is a French writer, photographer, installation artist, and conceptual artist. One of the most significant feature of her is the detective-like ability to follow strangers and investigate their private lives. For example, in her 1979 work Suite Venitienne, Calle followed a man she met at a party in Paris to Venice, where she disguised herself and followed him around the city, photographing him. She collected and compiled her surveillance into black and white photographs accompanied by text.

What is most interesting about Calle’s approach is that she never meant for this to be art – If it was without the text, the photographs could just be creepy daily captures of a man’s ordinary behaviors. But the power of her work reveals when you read through those lines and image yourself as the man in the photo. She fuses this reality with an element of the unreal – her own psychological projections and emotions which begin to build a fictional construct around her subject. That’s why the critics say “her work depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy”.