Just to get this out of the way: the depressing aspect of Sophie Calle’s Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished is the fact that its least interesting ideas still are vastly better than anything we typically come up with.
I. Not we. No doubt, you, the reader of these words, has vastly more interesting and inspiring ideas than I do. Clearly. But we, yes, you and I, probably think of many (most?) of them the way the French artist does (as evidenced in the book): They’re either not interesting enough, or we don’t follow through, or for some reason they don’t pan out, or they go sideways or lead down the wrong path.
Life, after all, leaves behind a graveyard of those kinds of ideas. And who likes turning around to look at all of those corpses, some of them still festering?
Well, Sophie Calle does. Or maybe she doesn’t. Because that’s the thing with this particular artist: as a viewer, you can’t tell. Calle has never merely gone through the motions. Instead, when she engages with something in any of her works, she does so with genuine passion.
I had foolishly underestimated how interesting and engaging it would be to see what unfolds in Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished, buying it long past it was first published. It’s not even that all of the various ideas explored in the book are groundbreaking or even interesting. What makes it all interesting is the artist’s way of dealing with what had been left unfinished.
I have no way of knowing whether the following is true, but I think that creative people and all the rest will look at the book differently (I do not mean to imply judgment of any kind with this statement).
Creativity is unthinkable without ideas, and without ideas there can be no failure. Creative failure can take many forms — that much is clear from the book. For this reason alone you need to spend time with it if you’re one of those creative types. That graveyard of ideas comes with very different sections, and not all sections are the same.
For example, in Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished, sketches are separated from attempts. Sketches don’t necessarily fail because otherwise they’d be considered attempts. But they’re also less than attempts, given that they’re not intended to be the real thing.
It’s always easier to learn from other people’s experiences than from one’s own (what is obvious when seen from afar for all kinds of reasons becomes muddled and impossible to see clearly when it’s close). But as a reader, you do not have to figure out what happened with the various ideas in the book. Calle tells you.
“Lack of conviction” is one reason (in “Sketches”). “Wrong turn” is another. It’s hard to believe, but there also is “Self-Censorship”; but then that revelation says more about how as viewers/readers, the French artist has so successfully created the idea that she has no boundaries, that anything goes. No, that’s not the case.
It’s difficult not to confuse the art with its maker when said maker centers the art so much around herself and her vulnerabilities.
What Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished might demonstrate — and I’m aware that this contradicts the very sentiment I started out from (and why not?) — is not Sophie Calle has way more interesting ideas than the rest of us, but that her secret (if that’s the word) is to relentlessly pursue them and execute them.
After all, that graveyard of our past ideas (there it is again) is filled with our own murders, with neglect or lack of execution probably being the two most prominent causes of death.
(I once met a graduate student who did not really have a lot of photographs to show. Instead, they spent their initial crit only talking about all of the ideas they had in their mind. Owning a camera is not what makes you a photographer. Owning a camera is what makes you a person who owns a camera.)
But there is more. One of the most intriguing aspects of the book for me was to see the artist evaluate how some ideas turned out with time. Some ideas simply weren’t that interesting once they were pursued. Some went sideways. And then there were some that simply weren’t, to use the artist’s word, exhilarating.
Of course, you only learn about this once you pursue an idea. But ideas often lead to unexpected outcomes — unless, that is, you stick to the original idea, no matter what happens.
This gets at maybe my biggest problem with a lot of contemporary photography: too many books and exhibitions feature photography that illustrate an idea in the worst possible fashion. As a viewer, you can tell that someone had an idea (which is good) and then they faithfully produced it as if the idea where a paint-by-number piece of work (which is not good).
In other words, too much contemporary photography fails the very test that had certain of Sophie Calle’s ideas end in Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished.
Honestly, how much of contemporary photography really passes the “Entertaining, nothing more” threshold? Three quarters of, for example, Martin Parr’s career output fail that test. Which by the way isn’t even a form of criticism as much as an observation regarding one crucial shortcoming of the world of photography: we all want photography to be art, but we never talk about what we want our art to do.
From my teaching years I know that most photographers don’t bother dealing with Sophie Calle because photography doesn’t play a large enough role in her work but also because — and I know that people would never admit this in public — it is simultaneously too playful and sincere.
But that’s a huge mistake. If anything, if you want to take just one thing from Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished as a creative person (whether you’re a photographer or whatever else), it’s that creativity lives from everything that makes us human (which is why “AI” will only ever produce meaningful art for people who don’t understand the very essence of art itself).
So get yourself a copy of the book and then apply the criteria used by Calle to your own ideas, sketches, and projects: could anything have gone farther? Did anything not go far enough?
In the end, art is made by human beings. Without being afflicted by the vagaries of human life art is not art.
I’m sure that there are numerous ideas or projects that did not make it into this book. This is, after all, a fiction — much like the rest of Sophie Calle’s work. But just like the rest it holds up so well.
Recommended.
Catalogue Raisonné of the Unfinished; texts and images by Sophie Calle; 240 pages; Actes Sud, 2025
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