Sophie Calle: Oversharing

Something curious happened a few days before I received Sophie Calle’s Overshare, the catalogue of a recent retrospective of the French artist’s work. Describing Voir La Mer to a group of photographers, I told them that Calle had brought people who had never seen the ocean to it so that they may see it for the first time. But, I said, she had only filmed (or photographed) them from the back. A viewer would have to imagine this particular moment in these strangers’ lives. Alas, Overshare showed me, I had misremembered Calle’s art piece; or maybe I had tweaked it mentally towards what I would have shown. Instead, after Calle’s subjects had faced — and seen — the ocean, at the artist’s request they had turned towards the camera so that we, the artwork’s viewers, would see their faces (meaning their eyes).

Thinking about this seemingly inconsequential episode, it seems to me that what I had misremembered was not so much one of Sophie Calle’s minor pieces (your mileage might vary). Instead, I had put my own interpretation of this artist onto it. Calle’s work has been very, very dear to me for many years, and I have spent a lot of time with it.

In her introductory essay, curator Henriette Huldisch writes how Calle has had to fight with what male artists never had to contend with. While, for example, writer Karl Ove Knausgård’s generous (and if you ask me completely insufferable and self-indulgent) oversharing has never counted as anything other than major literature (even as that writer’s seemingly endless revelations of life details end up being an exercise in vapid form: so many books, so many pages), for women artists such as Calle that process has not been quite as easy at all, with frequent criticism leveled at what to many people (for all the wrong reasons) did or does not look like art.

I could see how my misremembering might be seen as yet another older guy seeing a woman artist’s work in the wrong light. And yet, I will contend that my misremembering was instead fueled by my familiarity with Sophie Calle’s best pieces. While oversharing can be seen as being an essential aspect of the French artist’s work, to see it as just that or, maybe more precisely, to end the discussion right there runs the risk of missing the key characteristic of her work. After all, there is a reason why Sophie Calle is considered to be one of contemporary art’s most poignant practitioners while the stars of today’s (and by now yesterday’s) reality-TV shows are not: very crucially, Calle’s sharing stops where the real hurt begins. In contrast, in reality-TV shows, the hurt is spread out for all to witness, typically with gratuitously overscripted neoliberal solutions added at the end. Reality TV might be TV, but it has nothing to do with the reality we experience in our lives.

The point of most of Calle’s works is not so much what is being shown — as revealing as it might be. For example, inviting strangers to sleep in your bed while photographing them is transgressive in some ways (even though in the age of AirBnB and the discovery of hidden cameras, that transgressiveness has faded considerably). However, the point of The Sleepers is that the feelings that might arise — and this is where Calle’s work and reality TV depart radically — are being left to imagine. In other words, what makes most of Sophie Calle’s work so radically emotionally potent is not a revelation, however far it might go, but instead the frustration of a viewer’s desire for the painful or deeply emotional moments to be resolved. And that’s exactly why I was so disappointed to see the faces of the people who had seen the ocean for the first time.

Sophie Calle’s art thus is life, our daily life, a life that unlike reality TV is not lived around the same repeating script. For all of us, The show will be over at some point. But we won’t know whether there will be the beautiful resolution just in time or a cliffhanger (that, granted, we will not be around to deal with any longer). Chances are that some things will simply not be resolved. Put bluntly, Monique, Sophie Calle’s mother who was reported to have proclaimed “Finally!” when she became her daughter’s subject on her deathbed, is not around any longer to see the piece.

There is a distinct and at time very strong red thread of transgressiveness in Calle’s work. It’s not in all pieces, but it shines through over the years. Sophie Calle always wants to know more about someone than what might be “proper”. This is interesting, because what actually is proper often is not clearly defined. To give a completely unrelated example, when I went to Japan, a few strangers told me things I would have never dared ask them about (in fact, even in the US, asking friends about them would have been not straightforward). But there was no risk for these strangers, because I was one, too. And not only that, I also was an outsider, someone completely outside of the norms they had to live with. To paraphrase a different idea, what is proper is proper until it is no more.

Throughout the years, Sophie Calle has subjected strangers to her unbounded curiosity, whether with their consent or not. Inevitably, the ethics of doing it enter immediately. It’s one thing to invite strangers to tell you a secret to then bury it (or hide it in a safe). It’s quite another to find someone’s address book and to then not only call the people contained therein but to also write about it in a newspaper. In the end, this approach is testing a viewer’s/reader’s boundaries: how far would I go? What do I feel is proper?

Unfortunately, with ethics being ethics and strong feelings seeking an outlet, Calle has opened up herself to quite a bit of abuse. A male artist might have got away with the address-book idea more easily than a female one (there is, after all, that rather primitive idea of male bravado). Henriette Huldisch discusses this aspect at length in her essay.

This is not to say that all of Calle’s projects were ethically solid (the artist appeared to have realized as much after The Address Book). Yet, I maintain that there is much to be gained from probing the boundaries of what is proper, in particular when you include yourself in the work. I feel that this aspect or art making is criminally underdiscussed in the world of photography, where too many photographers too strongly believe in their privilege as the person in charge of the camera.

As a brief aside, this does not mean that including yourself automatically makes work OK. For example, Antoine d’Agata’s work will forever be tainted by the artist’s broken moral compass, regardless of how many times the photographer puts himself in front of his camera.

The key to probing boundaries is to be aware of them and to be aware of the transgression. This entails acknowledging other people, and it involves empathy (d’Agata’s work is failing on all counts here). For me, Calle’s work is strongest where transgressiveness and empathy both play a very important role. Where one is noticeably absent, things don’t quite take off — or they take the wrong turn. That’s why, for example, The Sleepers is so much stronger (in all kinds of ways) than The Address Book.

But is there a Sophie Calle? Is it a good idea to treat the person behind the many different bodies of work as the exact same person (as I did when I thought about Voir La Mer)? Or rather, can we distinguish different phases (if we want to use that word) in this artist’s career that might differ from each other — and if yes, what might those differences be?

Overshare solves that riddle through chapters (“The Spy”, “The Protagonist”, “The End”, “The Beginning”), which does the trick — or rather a trick. The problem with organizing an artist’s work through their artistic strategies is that you introduce a strong reductive element into things. Obviously, for an exhibition to work you will need some organization, especially if an audience (here in Minnesota) might not be very familiar with the artist in question. (If Tim Waltz was right with his “mind your own damn business” spiel, the Minnesota audience will experience the very opposite of it.)

Still, I feel that the rather simplistic chapters undermine some of the spirit of Sophie Calle’s work, larger parts of which were done with that wink towards the people whose lives were being put under a microscope — and towards the audience that simultaneously is told that they’re in on the joke, while somehow being made to feel uneasy about that very fact.

Regardless, while I stopped maintaining the illusion that the world of photography (outside of her native France) will suddenly realize how much Sophie Calle has to offer, there still is that shimmer of hope. And here’s a new book, a very nice overview with some essential pieces, some well known, others less so. You might as well have a look!

Sophie Calle: Overshare; edited with text by Henriette Huldisch; text by Mary Ceruti, Eugenie Brinkeman, Aruna D’Souza, Courtenay Finn; 200 pages; Walker Art Center; 2024

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Ever since Vaterland, my first photobook, I have been following the rise and spread of neofascism in Europe and beyond. Since my book was published, anti-democratic forces in Germany have more than doubled their vote share while democratic parties have adopted far-right talking points. It’s probably fair to say that the left as a political power has become irrelevant, and most democratic parties offer some variant of conservative policies. The social-democratic West Germany I was born into has now become a historical oddity, as the country’s dominant political class has morphed into a feckless, ruthlessly neoliberal clique.

It is only its history that differentiates Germany from the rest of Europe. Neoliberalism has swept across the continent, and it has brought about a sharp rise in neofascist parties everywhere. Prabhat Patnaik wrote a concise article about the relationship between neoliberalism and neofascism. He argues that there is a conflict between them that might rupture things eventually. But that’s hardly a consolation for all those who are swept up under neofascist, illiberal regimes.

In 2023, I had the opportunity to travel to Budapest again. Under Viktor Orbán rule, Hungary has been transformed into the closest equivalent of Vladimir Putin’s Russia in the European Union (if you don’t believe me, maybe this article will set you straight: “Today, Hungary is a flourishing dictatorship.”). Of course, I had to bring my camera to loosely continue the work I had done with Vaterland.

After all, almost everywhere you go in Europe, you will stumble across traces of the devastation wrought by Nazi Germany. I wanted to pick up on some of those traces, knowing full well that up until 1944, Hungary was actually allied with Nazi Germany.

Furthermore, as Jason Stanley outlines in Erasing History, neofascist rulers have a particular interest in re-defining their nation’s history. This inevitably involves making the nation “great again” by erasing everything that stands in the way of that supposed greatness.

Photography is great for such work because you don’t need much more than surfaces. History is told through surfaces — and erasure. Erasure leaves holes and gaps, and you can train your camera on those as well. In general, the more furiously a regime is trying to re-define its nation’s history, the more traces you will find.

At the same time, while I could have made work around on the role of history for the neofascist project, that idea felt incomplete to me. It also did not feel right: I did not want to tell Hungarians’ story. Other photographers might not have any problems with that, and I certainly do not want to imply any judgment on them for their choices.

After all, the story of neofascism is always also the story of the people who have to live under it. In part, my thinking might be informed by trying to find out for years what Germans such as my grandparents were thinking while they were living in Nazi Germany. Books such as Svetlana Alexievich‘s also left a deep mark in my psyche: they’re most filled with narrations by ordinary people, and it is the steady accumulation of minute details that fills out the larger picture.

So I decided that I would seek out Hungarian people and have them talk about their country. I put out a call on Instagram: if you’re Hungarian, will you talk to me about your country? A number of people offered their time, and I am intensely grateful to them: Judith Gellér, Milos Kallai, Domonkos Németh, Ákos Polgárdi, Andi Schmied, and Liza Szabó.

For these conversations, I prepared a small number of very broad and simple questions, and people told me what they felt they needed to tell me. Later, I went through the collections of texts, and I extracted parts that I then assembled into a text that runs parallel to the photographs in what became Fault Lines, my new photobook or rather image-text book. I also added a few quotes by Hungarian leaders (who much like all neofascists have always been very open about their motivations).

I am also very grateful to the photography students who kindly allowed me to take their portraits: Daniella Grinberg, Anna Gajewsky, Laura Virág Szekeres, Tamara Süle, Hunor Tóth, and Andris Turi. And of course, I am grateful to Hungarian photographers Arion Gabór Kudász, Gábor Máté, Peter Puklus, Krisztina Erdei, and Ábel Szalontai who spoke with me about photography, their country, Hungarian wine, and much more.

Even though the following isn’t part of my book, I believe that it is worthwhile pointing it out: for such a small country, Hungary has had an outsized influence on the history of photography. Major names include Brassaï (born Gyula Halász), Robert Capa (born Endre Ernő Friedmann; who for better or worse became maybe the role model of the dashing photojournalist), André Kertész, and László Moholy-Nagy (who defined photographic modernity to an extent unmatched by anyone else).

Actually, there is a connection with an aspect in my book: they all left Hungary and attained their fame elsewhere.

Just like my first book, Fault Lines was published by Kerber Verlag. You can get a copy either through them, a friendly bookseller, or you can get a copy directly from me (if you’re interested, send me an email: jmcolberg@gmail.com). I have a lot of copies for sale, so please don’t hesitate to reach out.

“The prize celebrates the vital work of translators, with the £50,000 prize money divided equally between the author and the translator,” the website of the International Booker Prize announces. For anyone who is able to speak and read more than one language, such a prize makes perfect sense, given that languages differ in any number of ways. Nuance, for example, is expressed very differently in English and Japanese. Good translation will make sure that nuances expressed differently in different languages will not get lost.

Even though I think that for all kinds of reasons photography prizes need to be abolished (they only serve to re-enforce neoliberal ideas, and that’s not even going into the issue of conflicts of interest), I find it interesting to entertain the equivalent of the International Booker Prize for photobooks. There, the roles of author and translator would be occupied by the photographer and the person who conceptualizes the book.

It might seem strange to think of making a photobook from photographs as a translation. There are books for which that translation mostly does not matter; as I’ve argued here for years, these books are mostly not very interesting at all. For most books, though, careful thinking has to be employed to fit the work in question into the relatively limited form of a book.

Done well, a photobook becomes its own work of art that stands on equal footing next to its source photographs. This fact is most obvious where at first the differences between the book and the photographs are enormous.

If you take the work of Awoiska van der Molen, the photographs have a commanding presence. By that I do not want to refer to their sizes, even though scale might play a role. Instead, it is the complex interplay of very careful studio work with the imagery itself that has an effect on viewers.

In fact, when in the presence of Van der Molen’s prints, Walter Benjamin’s talking point of a loss of aura, given the “mechanical reproduction”, makes little sense. The Marxist might have simply confused objects with what they communicate, a mistake he might not have made had he ever found himself faced with, say, a Carleton Watkins print.

When a book is made from such work, the translation into that format is crucial. You could attempt to make as large an object as possible to replicate the scale (and luxury aspect of the whole affair). But that approach treats the book as little more than a necessary evil. Instead, a bookmaker will have to try to replicate a viewer’s experience.

With Hans Gremmen, the designer and producer behind FW:Books, Van der Molen found her perfect bookmaking partner, a person uniquely capable of coming up with perfect translations. Ever since Sequester, published ten years ago, Gremmen has been producing books for this photographer.

Sequester and most of the work since has dealt with landscapes or rather with being immersed in a landscape. The specifics of the various locations in which the photographs had been taken in were of no concern for the artist or her viewers. Instead, the photographs centered on the sublime.

Van der Molen’s newest work, entitled The Humanness of Our Lonely Selves (a most clunky and unfortunate title), is less of a departure from the earlier landscapes than it might seem at first. After all, the photographer’s work does not concern itself much with what it shows; instead, it centers on what it makes a viewer feel. The feelings when confronted with those eerie, dark landscapes and these brightly illuminated, yet oddly mute windows lit up at night are very much identical.

None of the windows allow for looking in. There is the frequent presence of frosted glass, and there are curtains. It would be difficult to imagine an artist who spent so much time escaping to foreboding landscapes to suddenly develop an interest in peeking into people’s lives anyway. Sure, there are traces of those lives. But given the abstractions created by circumstances as much as the camera, these traces dissolve into abstractions.

We all want to belong. And yet…

Our Lonely Selves was first exhibited as a set of carbon prints (which I did not have the opportunity to see). Carbon prints have their own characteristics that are difficult to explain if you have never seen one. And again, how would this be translated into the book?

Careful printing would have to be of the order to get at the essence of carbon prints, and that means the right combination of paper and the layering of inks upon it. While Sequester alternated details of individual images with complete ones, this particular book remains at the level of the photographs. There would not have been a reason to zoom in to show details from large prints.

Zooming in would feel inappropriate anyway, given that as a viewer, you’re made to linger outside of someone’s home in the dark. This is where the work acquires its own edge. After all, why are you there? Why would the photographer wait outside strangers’ people’s homes (in a country far away no less) to then put her viewers into her place in a gallery or their home?

Many of the photographs are rather similar, which only serves to underscore the variations encountered: the different items whose contours are delineated and the implications that can be derived for their owners. And the viewing is ultimately frustrated anyway, because the accumulation of all of those contours does not add up to anything.

You end up traveling to a country far away to look and look and look out, only to realize that it’s within yourself that there’s more looking to be done.

You cannot escape your own loneliness, however hard you try.

You cannot shake it in any of those sweltering summer nights.

I suppose that with words someone else might have manged to achieve some of what Awoiska van der Molen achived here (Olga Tokarczuk comes to mind, in particular Flights). But words seek out being resolved in ways that photographs are unable to.

Photography’s dumb muteness will always prevent it from being fully resolved.

And in the hands of the most talented photographers, that’s a huge gift.

The Humanness of Our Lonely Selves; 56 pages | Leporello with 16 page insert; FW:Books; 2024

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