I adore Sophie Calle, and if you were to look into my AS photography book or the work I did for A2, you'd find it full of Calle-inspired works and full of artist research and artist appreciation pages for her.
I find I like Calles work so much as I can find so much of it in myself, the obsessive nature, the need for everything to fall in a certain collective way, the want of irrelevant knowledge and the satisfaction in organizing and re-organizing yourself. I fall in love with each and every moment captured, each and every photo set and all the ways she uses to describe herself with other things, the way she forces her own personality into her life, just in the way she lives.
The photograph below is from a "birthday cabinet", each year she invites the same amount of people as her age to a get together and one extra, who she doesn't know to show the uncertainty in the future, and how that should be valued, each present goes into one of these cabinets, to be used the following year, as a reminder of the things that have gone and the things that are to come.
The cabinets inspired my collecting of bus tickets, I have a box for all my personal ones (though I seem to never have as many going in as I did before..) and a box for discarded tickets I seem to acquire. I find this to be an interesting way to show my own personal love for traveling, even if it's to not very far away lands, sometimes even going into the city or into the town is a good enough adventure for one day, but it keeps on my dream to travel to as many places as physically possible in one lifetime, and eventually find somewhere to stay and to enjoy for the remainder of my years.
This collecting also inspired my first photography AS project, when I picked one thing of the street each day and dropped them all onto the top of the photocopier and photocopied them as they were, and due to the fact they were A2 print outs, they couldn't be scanned in well enough to be able to show them on my blog, but they were interesting, even if it was solely created out of peoples discarded items.
This photo is from "hotel rooms" which is, as it looks and sounds, photographs of hotel rooms, and, again, my love of travel and my love of the differences in people and personalities comes into this as it shows the difference of both places and people. I find the difference in placed things interesting in these and how neat or tidy people can be, the way people hang certain things but leave others in bags and what consists of importance in placing on desks.
Despite the fact it shows all these things most people cannot see the value in discovering things about people, be it friends, strangers or yourself, through little things like those shown in these sets.
Most people I know tend to lie their interests in Sophie with the phone booth. Calle decorated a phone booth with a chair, drinks, flowers, photographs....etc and used it as a means to try and brighten a persons day when they were to come across it, to make a simple day-to-day thing enjoyable, it gave an interesting point to how we value our lives, just as Stephen Gill did with "outside in" but with different contexts. Gill tried to show we don't always pick up on the little details of our lives, where as Calle was trying to show how little details of our lives should be valued.
I really do love the phone booth and how well executed it was, it picks up on the differences of peoples lives, but finding something they all do to join them together.
The photo below is the set "sleepers" when she invited her friends to sleep in her bed and recorded the way they slept, which highlighted difference in comfort and personal differences, and the sharing of an object used for the greatest satisfaction of sleep. The relationship between a person and their bed is incredibly strong, and unless you are used to sharing the bed, it's strange to have another person in it, it's even stranger to then sleep in it after wards, to have another person find comfort and joy in something so personal is like breaking the bonds you've built in the "relationship" you've built.
I love how in some shots, the intruder to the personal comfort zone just stares into the camera, aware of having their comfort documented, which in all respects should lead away from any comfort you have made or acquired.
The documentation of another person in your bed must be something strange to feel, as if you are now a stranger to a good friend you saw not moments ago, which I find very similar to the song Stranger by Noah and the Whale.
The lines "everything I love has gone away, oh the dark night is moving slower, oh but sleep wont rescue me" is very significant in the connection between this song and the art work, as it sums my opinion of losing the close relationship between a person and their bed, and not quite being able to feel the same level of comfort in it again.
x
