Sophie Calle: True Stories

First published in 1994 and regularly reissued and expanded since, True Stories returns for the seventh time with eight new stories. 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. These real-life tales 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 and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.