True Stories, Sophie Calle

Calle’s projects have frequently drawn on episodes from her own life, but this book—part visual memoir, part meditation on the resonances of photographs and belongings—is as close as she has come to producing an autobiography, albeit one highly poetical and fragmentary, as is characteristic of her work.

The tales—never longer than a page—are by turns lighthearted, humorous, serious, dramatic or cruel. Each is accompanied by an image; each offers a fragment of life. Calle herself is the author, narrator and protagonist of her stories and photography. Her words are somber, chosen precisely and carefully. She offers up her own memories—childhood, marriage, sex and death—with brilliant humor, insight and pleasure. By turns serious, hilarious, dramatic or cruel, these real-life stories represent a form of work in progress recounting fragments of her life.

Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Hayward Gallery and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.