Hotel Room 29/March 6

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The art of Sophie Calle combines text and image, performance and photographic documentation and fact and fiction in order to address issues of identity and social interaction. After Les Tombes, Calle began to blend her life and her art. She creates a persona and carries out actions appropriate to it in an unsuspecting world. In The Hotel series, she worked as a chambermaid in Venice where she “examined the personal belongings of the hotel guests and observed through details lives which remained unknown to me.” Calle photographed the items as if they were ethnographic objects or evidence of a crime; her written descriptions are more personal and speculative. This series, like much of Calle’s work, poses questions about the conflict between a subject’s privacy and the rights of the photographer, the relationship between fact and fiction and the nature of photographic truth.

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