In 1981, Sophie Calle spent three weeks working as chambermaid in a hotel in Venice. This allowed her to spy on the guests. Like a detective or crime photographer, she photographs the momentarily unoccupied hotel rooms: the unmade or never slept in beds, the stray items left in bathrooms, the contents of suitcases and closets and she reads letters left lying in the open etc. she wrote a diary of every object photographed and tryed to gain an idea of what the person was like who owned them.
Calle turns the viewer or reader into an accomplice of her voyeurism – filling them, too, with the urge to move unobserved through another’s private sphere. This works with my idea of process art (bringing it to life after it is viewed/shared)
Like with many of Sophie Calle’s works, photographs and texts exist in a circular self-referring structure: the objects that Calles mentions in the text are found again in the photographs, but their role as evidence is first established through the telling of the story, whose believability lies solely in the hands of the artist.
This has given me the idea to possibly look at other peoples personal objects?
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