17 Feb 2010

Sophie Calle - The Shadow (Detective), 1985




«In April 1981, at my request, my mother went to a detective agency. She hired them to follow me, to report my daily activities, and to provide photographic evidence of my existence.» (Sophie Calle. Double Game. With the Participation of Paul Auster, London 1999)In «The Shadow» she sets the detective's photographic account against her own observations: the observer becomes the observed. The viewer is the third witness. This search for her own identity fails to reveal a clear picture here, too. Sophie Calle's face does not appear in any of the pictures: her figure emerges like a shadow throughout the detective's photographs.


From Book : T.Y. Levin, U. Frohne, P. Weibel, 2002, [CTRL] SPACE Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, ZKM Center for the Art and Media, Karlshruhe, Germany; and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, p.410-415.

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