Sophie Calle is a French photographer, writer and conceptual artist who was born in Paris in 1953. Calle’s work is recognised globally due to its unusual and often uncomfortable tensions, its vulnerability and its exploration of intimacy and identity. Her methods intertwine her personal life with her artistic work. Calle often throws herself passionately into her projects and generally positions herself in tense psychological and/or emotional situations, often directly involving others in her projects. She appears willing to put herself at the centre of her pieces, inviting the viewer into her experiences in what can only be described as a very purposeful manner. Acknowledged for her invasion into the private lives of strangers, she uses voyeurism and surveillance, and often chooses to accompany her photographic work with panels of her own writing:
“Calle’s enduring concern with paired images and texts reveals an obvious debt to Conceptual art…her work recalls the enigmatic word-and-image narratives of the 1970s by artists like Bill Beckley and Mac Adams” (Pincus, 1989)
The centrality of distorting concepts of privacy within Calle’s work is important because it demonstrates the artificiality in the notion that interpersonal relationships occur in abstraction, and not in the broader socialisation of the public realm, that conditions them and provides them with meaning. Calle directly implicates the audience in her work by coercing them into participation, as the psychological impact of her work is based on the individual’s subjective interpretation of the material. The binary between personal and public is blurred within her work to such an extent that the private (the viewer) is located within the sphere of the public (the art). The artist invites the audience to intrude on her personal life, as well as that of strangers, making the viewer uncomfortable but also intrigued as in modern society, our general perception of relationships is personal, rather than public.
Calle’s work is often referenced in postmodern discussions regarding the importance and function that the author or artist holds within their work. Many view the artist as the author of their artefact, and, therefore, the artist’s own ideology is replicated in the process of actualisation, with the effect that the artist cannot be removed from the artefact they produce. However, in The Death of the Author (1967), Roland Barthes, a French theorist, explains that all texts are mediated by prior social and political knowledge and therefore lack originality. Barthes believes the author exists only as a tool and not as a constructed consciousness:
“…the modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.” (Barthes, 1977)
The Death of the Author marks a milestone for 20th century literary theory and deeply influenced postmodern trends in the visual art world. At first glance, all of Calle’s work discussed here appears deeply and intentionally personal to the artist, arguably making it impossible to remove the artist from her work. A lot of her pieces are based upon her own experiences and, as such, Calle seems to challenge directly Barthes’ theory that the artist is somehow irrelevant to its interpretation. However, Calle’s work accentuates the importance of the role of the viewer in considering the artefact and subsequently how it is then subjectively considered.