It is the first week of April, Paris, 1979. You arrive at noon in Montparnasse, the address you’d been given, and ring the buzzer. You’re let in and climb several flights of stairs, until you reach the apartment where Sophie Calle greets you. A friend of a friend, she had called you last week, inviting you to sleep in her bed. From April 1 at 5 p.m. to April 9 at 10 a.m., Calle has arranged for a series of sleepers to take turns in her bed. You agree to be one of them.

Her instructions are simple: she will provide clean bedding and breakfast, lunch, or dinner; she will record the answers you will give to a questionnaire she’s prepared, not to pry, but to establish a “neutral” relationship; and most strangely, she will photograph you every hour. She’ll watch you sleep.

By the end of your eight-hour stay, you will have become one of the twenty-seven “sleepers” that make up The Sleepers (Les dormeurs), Calle’s first exhibition, which debuted in 1979. Most of the sleepers are acquaintances or strangers, and the project was not planned as an exhibition—it began as a singular exploration of encounter and photography.

As Calle explains, “For The Sleepers, I invited a woman I bumped into at the market in Rue Daguerre to come and sleep in my bed…She was living with Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, the art critic. He asked if he could see the photos and then he came up with the idea of exhibiting them at the Biennale des jeunes [Young Artists’ Biennial] in Paris. I remember at the time asking myself: ‘Do I want to be an artist?’”

Calle’s path to The Sleepers and her artistic career was unconventional. At 18, she traveled to Lebanon to understand the Palestinian struggle (and to impress a leftist leader she had fallen in love with), returning to Paris to work with the Prison Information Group and help organize illegal abortions in the early 1970s. As a sociology student at the University of Paris IX, she studied under Jean Baudrillard, who would later write an essay for her first book, Suite Vénitienne (1983).

Rather than complete her degree, Calle embarked on a seven-year journey across Crete, Mexico, Canada, and the United States. It was in Bolinas, California, watching images emerge in a rented house’s darkroom, that she decided to return to Paris and pursue photography. Back in the city at 26, she lived between her father’s apartment—where The Sleepers would be staged—and an abandoned hotel at Gare d’Orsay, where she photographed empty rooms and gathered discarded objects.

During this time, she also secretly followed a man through Venice, documenting the experience in what would become Suite Vénitienne (1983) and, following The Sleepers, embarked on her second exhibition. For this piece she invited passers-by in the Bronx to take her wherever they wanted, preferably to a place they could never forget, pinning the resulting photos and companion texts, taken from interviews with her guides to the gallery walls. This early work is haunted by transience, eschewing prepackaged narratives to trace fluctuations of intimacy and distance. It also laid the foundations for Calle’s process: in almost all cases, she follows a set of protocols, creating a “game” she records through image and text that become exhibitions, artist’s books, or both.

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