The Address Book
Sophie Calle
hardback, 5.25 × 7.5 in.
104 pages, 26 bw and 2 color
978-0-9799562-9-4
published in 2012
fourth printing
Most books, most artworks, are so civilized, they hardly matter. They exist in the realm of please and thank you. But art at its best is a kind of gamble with civility, with ethics, with boundaries, with good citizenship, and with the question of what we can endure in life, and death.
—Sheila Heti, The Believer
Having found a lost address book on the street in Paris, artist Sophie Calle copied the pages before returning it anonymously to its owner. She then began contacting the people—in essence, following him through the map of his family, friends, lovers, and acquaintances.
Sophie Calle’s written accounts of these encounters—juxtaposed with her photographs—originally appeared as serial in the French newspaper Libération over the course of one month in 1983. Now, The Address Book, a key and controversial work in Calle’s oeuvre, is being published for the first time in its entirety in English as a beautiful trade edition artist’s book, designed in collaboration with the artist.
As The Address Book entries accumulate, so do the vivid impressions of its owner, Pierre D., while suggesting ever more complicated stories as information is gifted, parsed, and withheld. A multitude of details—from the seemingly banal to the potentially revelatory—are collaged into a fragile and strangely intimate portrait of Pierre D.; while Calle, over the course of her pursuit, also turns the interrogation on herself, her own fears, assumptions, and obsessions.
Part conceptual art, part character study, part confession, part essay, Sophie Calle’s The Address Book is, above all, a prism through which desire and the elusory, persona and identity, the private and the public, knowledge and the unknown are refracted in luminous and provocative ways.
read
excerpts in The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine
about the author
SOPHIE CALLE (b. 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose work often fuses conceptual art and Oulipian-like constraints, investigatory methods and fictional constructs, the plundering of autobiography and the artful composition of self. Using a range of media—books, photography, film, writing, performance, and installation—Calle explores the tensions between the observed, the reported, the secret, and the unsaid. Desire and voyeurism are often agents to expose the multiplicity of truth as well as its absence. Most recently, she was invited to occupy the Musée national Picasso-Paris where in 2023 she staged the large-scale, multifarious solo exhibition À toi de faire, ma mignonne. A limited retrospective Overshare opens at the Walker Art Center in October.
more by sophie calle
press
Reviews in ArtNews, The Believer, Bookforum, Los Angeles Review of Books, Los Angeles Times Jacket Copy, NPR Weekend Edition, Publishers Weekly, Salon.com
see also
✼ natalie’s upstate weather report:
April 11, 2024 — The spring peepers have thawed (these little frogs freeze in winter) and now, unabashedly randy, they chirp. At first there was one, then two, and now it sounds like thousands. Two days ago, when it was truly spring, their adamantine chorus was almost deafening (we closed the windows to simply think!). Siglio has relocated to a lush, thriving hollow at the furthest most edge of the Berkshires after two years of peripatetics, sans library—which is now unpacked in a less than Benjaminian manner (little time to contemplate—our urgency in getting books on shelves mirrored the peepers need to mate). The first few months of 2024 were almost unendurable, but we’re home, spring is here, and there are books to made. We are singing!
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