Софи Каль: Фотосуретші, жазушы және тұжырымдамалық суретшінің өнері

French writer, photographer, installation artist, and conceptual artist

Sophie Calle (born 9 October 1953) is a French writer, photographer, installation artist, and conceptual artist. Calle's work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement known as Oulipo. Her work frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy. She is recognized for her detective like tendency to follow strangers and investigate their private lives. Her photographic work often includes panels of text of her own writing. Since 2005, Calle has taught as a professor of film and photography at European Graduate School in Saas Fee, Switzerland. She has lectured at the University of California, San Diego in the Visual Arts Department. She has also taught at Mills College in Oakland, California. Exhibitions of Calle's work took place at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme, Paris; Paula Cooper Gallery, New York; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels, Belgium; Videobrasil, SESC Pompeia, São Paulo, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil; Whitechapel Gallery, London; She represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2007. In 2019 she was the recipient of the Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship.

In Suite Venitienne (1979), 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. Calle's surveillance of the man, who she identifies only as Henri B., includes black and white photographs accompanied by text. Calle's first artistic work was The Sleepers (Les Dormeurs), a project in which she invited passers by to occupy her bed. Some were friends, or friends of friends, and some were strangers to her. She served them food and photographed them every hour. In order to execute her project The Hotel (1981), she was hired as a chambermaid at a hotel in Venice where she was able to explore the writings and objects of the hotel guests. Insight into her process and its resulting aesthetic can be gained through her account of this project: "I spent one year to find the hotel, I spent three months going through the text and writing it, I spent three months going through the photographs, and I spent one day deciding it would be this size and this frame it's the last thought in the process."

One of Calle's first projects to generate public controversy was Address Book (1983). The French daily newspaper Libération invited her to publish a series of 28 articles. Having recently found an address book on the street (which she photocopied and returned to its owner), she decided to call some of the telephone numbers in the book and speak with the people about its owner. To the transcripts of these conversations, Calle added photographs of the man's favorite activities, creating a portrait of a man she never met, by way of his acquaintances. The articles were published, but upon discovering them, the owner of the address book, a documentary filmmaker named Pierre Baudry, threatened to sue the artist for invasion of privacy. As Calle reports, the owner discovered a nude photograph of her, and demanded the newspaper publish it, in retaliation for what he perceived to be an unwelcome intrusion into his private life. Another of Calle's noteworthy projects is titled The Blind (1986), for which she interviewed blind people, and asked them to define beauty. Their responses were accompanied by her photographic interpretation of their ideas of beauty, and portraits of the interviewees. Calle has created elaborate display cases of birthday presents given to her throughout her life; this process was detailed by Grégoire Bouillier in his memoir The Mystery Guest: An Account (2006). According to Bouillier, the premise of his story was that "A woman who has left a man without saying why calls him years later and asks him to be the 'mystery guest' at a birthday party thrown by the artist Sophie Calle. And by the end of this fashionable—and utterly humiliating—party, the narrator figures out the secret of their breakup."

In 1996, Calle asked Israelis and Palestinians from Jerusalem to take her to public places that became part of their private sphere, exploring how one's personal story can create an intimacy with a place. Inspired by the eruv, the Jewish law that permits to turn a public space into a private area by surrounding it with wires, making it possible to carry objects during the Sabbath, the is exposed at Paris's Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme. The same year, Calle released a film titled No Sex Last Night which she created in collaboration with American photographer Gregory Shephard. The film documents their road trip across America, which ends in a wedding chapel in Las Vegas. Rather than following the genre conventions of a road trip or a romance, the film is designed to document the result of a man and woman who barely knew each other, embarking on an intimate journey together. Calle asked writer and filmmaker Paul Auster to "invent a fictive character which I would attempt to resemble" and served as the model for the character Maria in Auster's 1992 novel Leviathan. This mingling of fact and fiction so intrigued Calle that she created the works of art created by the fictional character, which included a series of color coordinated meals. These works are documented in her publication Double Game (1999). Auster later challenged Calle to create and maintain a public amenity in New York City. The artist's response was to augment a telephone booth on the corner of Greenwich and Harrison Streets in Manhattan with a note pad, a bottle of water, a pack of cigarettes, flowers, cash, and sundry other items. Every day, Calle cleaned the booth and restocked the items, until the telephone company removed and discarded them. This project is documented in The Gotham Handbook (1998). Calle asked friends, acquaintances, and recommended women of all ages—including a parrot and a hand puppet—to interpret the break up e mail and presented the results in the French pavilion. Calle explains the piece as follows: "I received an email telling me it was over. I didn't know how to respond. It was almost as if it hadn't been meant for me. It ended with the words, 'take care of yourself.' And so I did. I asked 107 women, chosen for their profession or skills, to interpret this letter. To analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it. Exhaust it. Understand it for me. Answer for me. It was a way of taking the time to break up. A way of taking care of myself." Jessica Lott, winner of the Frieze Writer's Prize for her review of the piece, described it thus: "Take Care of Yourself is a break up letter (Calle's) then boyfriend (Grégoire Bouillier, dubbed ‘X’) sent her via e mail. Calle took the e mail, and the paralyzing confusion that accompanies the mind's failure to comprehend heartbreak, and distributed it to 107 women of various professions, skills and talents to help her understand it – to interpret, analyze, examine and perform it to gain perspective on her perplexing situation. Calle insists that she did not need the other women's sentiments for herself, but to ensure that the piece was well rounded. At her gallery shows, Calle frequently supplies suggestion forms on which visitors are encouraged to furnish ideas for her art, while she sits beside them with an uninterested expression. In 2009/2010, a major retrospective exhibition of her work, including Take Care of Yourself, The Sleepers, Address Book and others, was held opened at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

In 2011 her work True Stories was installed at the historic 1850 House at the Pontalba Building at Jackson Square in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana as part of the Prospect 2 Contemporary Art Festival. The house, an historic museum that is managed as part of the Louisiana State Museum, is furnished with historic furniture as it was in the mid 19th century. The artist inserted her own, personal historical objects and ephemera, with short, narrative explanatory text, into the scenes, affecting the notion that she had occupied the house shortly before the viewers' arrival. In 2012, Calle's The Address Book was published for the first time in its entirety. In 2015, Suite Vénitienne was redesigned and republished. In 2014, Calle’s work Rachel, Monique was displayed at the Episcopal Church of Heavenly Rest in New York City. It involved video Calle took of her mother, Monique Sindler, on her deathbed, as well as excerpts of her diary, read by actress Kim Cattrall. Calle took her mother’s portrait and jewelry and buried them at the North Pole. Portraits of her doing so were also on exhibition. In 2017, Calle was commissioned to create a public artwork for Green Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, Here Lie the Secrets of the Visitors of Green Wood Cemetery. The piece will remain in the cemetery for 25 years.

Christine Macel described Calle's work as a rejection of the Poststructuralist notion of the "death of the author" by working as a "first person artist" who incorporates her life into her works and, in a way, redefines the idea of the author. Angelique Chrisafis, writing in The Guardian, called her "the Marcel Duchamp of emotional dirty laundry". She was among the names in Blake Gopnik's 2011 list "The 10 Most Important Artists of Today", with Gopnik arguing, "It is the unartiness of Calle's work—its refusal to fit any of the standard pigeonholes, or over anyone's sofa—that makes it deserve space in museums."

Samba de Monalisa. Tetine vs Sophie Calle. (CD, Sulfur Records, 2002)
Souris Calle (Triple LP, 2018). Produced for an exhibition at Galerie Perrotin. 38 tracks by different artist about Calle's cat of 18 years. Artists include Laurie Anderson, Bono, Michael Stipe, Jean Michel Jarre, Pharrell Williams, Jarvis Cocker.