Biography

Sophie Calle (born 9 October 1953) is a French writer, photographer, installation artist, and conceptual artist. Calle's work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement of the 1960s known as Oulipo. Her work frequently depicts human vulnerability, and examines identity and intimacy. She is recognized for her detective-like ability 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 Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia; 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 Modern 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. Landmarks, the public art program of The University of Texas at Austin, exhibited Double-Blind (1992) and archived an essay dedicated to Calle and her work on their website. 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.