Sophie Calle: The Sleepers - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Calle's seminal 1979 series of people sleeping in her bed: now in English

In one of Sophie Calle's first artistic experiments, she invited friends, acquaintances and strangers to sleep in her bed. Twenty-seven people agreed, among them a baker, a babysitter, an actor, a journalist, a seamstress, a trumpet player and three painters. Calle photographed them awake and asleep, secretly recording any private conversations once the door closed. She served each a meal, and, if they agreed, she subjected them to a questionnaire that probed their personal predilections, habits and dreams as well as their interpretations of the act of sleeping in her bed: a curiosity, a game, an artwork, or--as Calle intended it--a job. The result, comprising her first exhibition in 1979, was a grid of 198 photographs and short texts.
Unlike the original installation, this artist's book version of The Sleepers contains not only all the photographs and captions but also her engrossing, novellalike narrative, untranslated until now. From the single, liminal mise-en-scène of her bedroom, Calle reports in text and photos, as if in real time, as sleepers arrive, talk, sleep, eat and leave. Their acute and sometimes startling, sometimes endearing particularities merge into something almost like an eight-day-long dream. Many seeds of Calle's subsequent works are embedded in The Sleepers: her exacting and transgressive methods of investigation, her cultivation of intimacy and remove, and her unrelenting curiosity. In this work, as she observes the sleepers, they observe her too--with reciprocal candor. The Sleepers, clothbound and pillow-like, unfolds as it opens, inviting the reader to join the others in Calle's bed.

Review Quotes

Under [Sophie Calle's] gaze, even the most unremarkable of guests become complex characters, forming part of a strange, ethereal collection of short stories.--Baya Simons "The Financial Times"

The book [...] is an intimate object whose tactility falls somewhere between a pillow and a sacred text, with its cushioned navy cover and three hundred silver gilded pages.-- "Photo Eye"

Always ahead of her time, Calle presaged our current lives under ubiquitous technological surveillance while testing and teasing the ever-thin line between intimacy and estrangement.--Hakim Bishara "Hyperallergic"

In our digital age Calle's themes take on new urgency. [...] The themes Calle has explored have amplified into a chronic condition of surveillance and hyper-vulnerability. Through this lens, the imperative repeatedly expressed across Calle's projects speaks directly to our moment: the art of seeing and of being seen must also address freedom and agency.--Kara Kelsey "Literary Hub"

The text, beautifully translated, and accompanied by the 198 photographs that composed her 1979 installation of the same title, is both a literary achievement and a document of a seminal performance at the start of her singular career.--Johanna Fateman "Cultured"

The 27 sleepers reward Calle with a raw intimacy. They are captured deep in sleep, feet flung out from under the covers, or caught on waking, startled by her photographs, Calle's voyeurist detective abilities softened by the vulnerability of the sleeping.--Hannah Silver "Wallpaper*"