Summer 1983. While wandering the streets of Paris, Sophie Calle finds an address book with an enticing red cover. Overwhelmed by curiosity as she turns the pages covered in casual notes, Calle decides to make the owner’s acquaintance, but not with a straightforward meeting. Instead, she decides that the identity of this intriguing individual will be revealed to her bit by bit, through the people whose names fill the pages of the notebook.
After deliberation, Calle, never known for her timidity, dials a first telephone number chosen at random from the list of 408 names. The person who picks up agrees to meet her. This is the beginning of the story of Pierre D., as told, unbeknownst to him, through the intersecting voices of his friends and acquaintances.
Taking inspiration from the original object, Calle compiles her findings in a kind of diary. Each encounter is the subject of a daily column in the French newspaper Libération, revealing more and more details about the notebook’s owner, sharing the artist’s voyeurism with the readers, who wait every day for the next chapter in this intrusive investigation. Little by little, Pierre D.’s life is revealed, his anonymity is compromised, it becomes possible to identify him, and the comfortable indiscretion which delighted the reader is replaced by the slow and exciting pleasure of the unmasking.
The owner, we learn, is a respected intellectual in the world of cinema. The character of Pierre D. is slowly replaced by a person. The photographs that accompany each text follow this progression, becoming less abstract, more personal, expressing the irreverent vice the artist, the participants and the readers have indulged in. Because the series only works as a whole, this first complete edition in English is an essential reading.
Laurence Cornet
The Address Book – Sophie Calle
Siglio Press
104 pages,
29,95 dollars
