Sophie Calle: Autobiographies

Calle’s Cash Machine photographs are made from ATM video surveillance footage, and each work is exhibited as a sequence of two to eleven images.

Encasing found pulp novels in vitrines, Calle recontextualizes lurid paperbacks with a series of questions ruminating on grief.  Following formal and thematic motifs present throughout the artist’s oeuvre, Série Noire is textual and investigative–a playful series that knowingly embraces kitsch.

This work is part of Calle’s ongoing exploration of the relationship between narrative, memory, and photography, and mixes humor and melancholy with her particular eye for irony. In each piece, a felt curtain embroidered with Calle’s writing conceals a hidden photograph behind it. In presenting viewers with the text before the picture, Calle upends the usual order in which images are read.