Sophie Calle uses the mediums of photography, video, film, books, text, and performance to pursue her sociological and autobiographical investigations. Her work often incorporates elements of voyeurism, surveillance, and personal narrative to explore the nature of love, intimacy, violence and death. Many of her works juxtapose writing and photography to question the dichotomies of truth versus fiction and public versus private.
Calle represented France in the 2007 Venice Biennale, and three years later she received the prestigious Hasselblad Award. A retrospective of Calle’s work premiered at the Centre George Pompidou in Paris in 2003 and toured to museums in Berlin and Dublin. She has had solo exhibitions around the world, including at the Fotomuseum Winterthur and Kunstmuseum Thun in Switzerland; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; the De Pont Museum in the Netherlands; and Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, Japan. Most recently, her work was featured in Sophie Calle: Overshare at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, which is accompanied by a catalogue. In addition to three solo exhibitions at Fraenkel Gallery her work has been included in a number of the gallery’s group exhibitions, including The Unphotographable.
Calle won a Praemium Imperiale Award in 2024. In 2019, she received the Centenary Medal from the Royal Photographic Society which was established in 1993 in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography. In 2017, the artist was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for My All (Actes Sud, 2016), a retrospective book of postcards documenting the artist’s 54 projects to date. Her previous books include The Sleepers (2024), Because (2024), The Elevator Resides in 501 (2022), The Hotel (2021), Suite Vénitienne (2015), Voir La Mer (2014), Rachel Monique (2012), The Address Book (2012), Sophie Calle: The Reader (2009), Take Care of Yourself (2007), Double Game (2007), Did Your See Me? (2004) and True Stories (1994). ARS Citizen mounted the first American retrospective of Calle’s work, featuring four of her most prominent series, at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, San Francisco.
