The Sleepers by Sophie Calle, translated by Emma Ramadan
In April 1979, French conceptual artist Sophie Calle offered her bed to strangers. It’s not what you think: She invited 27 individuals to each sleep in her bed for eight hours as long as they agreed to be watched, photographed, and answer a few questions. The result was an exhibition later that year presenting 198 photographs of the “sleepers” in various positions in Calle’s bed, collaged with brief texts describing what went on in their heads. This lovely book, promised to be “clothbound and pillow-like” when it’s released in November, is an expanded version of the 1979 exhibition, with never-before-translated first-person narratives by the artist about her end of the deal. Always ahead of her time, Calle presaged our current lives under ubiquitous technological surveillance while testing and teasing the ever-thin line between intimacy and estrangement.
Peggy: A Novel by Rebecca Godfrey with Leslie Jamison
In my early 20s I developed a fascination with Peggy Guggenheim, the brilliant yet flawed collector and arts patron whose undeniable contributions to modern art have often been eclipsed by sexist narratives of her personal life. Addressing these apparent contradictions while doing justice to her taste-making legacy is no small feat (Francine Prose achieves this in her 2015 biography, The Shock of the Modern. That’s why I’m so eager to dive into late Canadian author Rebecca Godfrey’s Peggy: A Novel, an imagined account of Guggenheim’s lived experiences told from the perspective of the woman herself. (The novel was completed by Leslie Jamison after Godfrey’s death in 2022.) Will the genre of fiction open up new possibilities to recast her story in a different, more encompassing light? I’ll report back.
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie
The title may suggest a technical manual, but The Use of Photography, published in French in 2005 and recently translated to English, is anything but dry. The moving memoir follows an intense affair between the authors that began during Ernaux’s treatment for breast cancer at the Institut Curie in Paris. Struck by the sight of clothing strewn around rooms and dinners left out overnight, the authors began photographing these compositions. The photographs both structure the narrative and serve as vehicles for meditations on pleasure, pain, melancholy, and the transience of life. The “use of photography” here is much like the use of all art: to remember, to comfort, and to record and perhaps free ourselves from the past.
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