Sophie Calle

Sophie Calle born 9 October 1953 is the French writer, photographer, installation artist, as well as conceptual artist. Calle's have is distinguished by its usage of arbitrary sets of constraints, as well as evokes the French literary movement call as Oulipo. Her make 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 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 advanced Art of Bahia, Salvador, Brazil; Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the De Pont Museum of Contemporary Art, Tilburg, Netherlands. She represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2007.

In 2017 she was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for her publication My All Actes Sud, 2016. In 2019 she was the recipient of the Royal Photographic Society's Centenary Medal and Honorary Fellowship.

Critical analysis

Christine Macel allocated Calle's work as a rejection of the Poststructuralist concepts of the "death of the author" by works as a "first-person artist" who incorporates her life into her working and, in a way, redefines the abstraction of the author.

Angelique Chrisafis, writing in The Guardian, called her "the Marcel Duchamp of emotional dirty laundry". She was among the designation in Blake Gopnik's 2011 list "The 10 near Important Artists of Today", with Gopnik arguing, "It is the unartiness of Calle's work—its refusal to fit all of the standards pigeonholes, or over anyone's sofa—that offers it deserve space in museums."