A forensic conceptualist's inventory of the ordinary and extraordinary lives in a Venetian hotel In 1981 Sophie Calle took a job as a chambermaid for the Hotel C in Venice, Italy. Stashing her camera and tape recorder in her mop bucket, she not only cleans and tidies, but sorts through the evidence of the hotel guests' lives. Assigned 12 rooms on the fourth floor, she surveys the state of the guests' bedding, their books, newspapers and postcards, perfumes and cologne, traveling clothes and costumes for Carnival. She methodically photographs the contents of closets and suitcases, examining the detritus in the rubbish bin and the toiletries arranged on the washbasin. She discovers their birth dates and blood types, diary entries, letters from and photographs of lovers and family. She eavesdrops on arguments and love-making. She retrieves a pair of shoes from the wastebasket and takes two chocolates from a neglected box of sweets, while leaving behind stashes of money, pills and jewelry. Her thievery is the eye of the camera, observing the details that were not meant for her, or us, to see. The Hotel now manifests as a book for the first time in English (it was previously included in the book Double Game). Collaborating with the artist on a new design that features enhanced and larger photographs, and pays specific attention to the beauty of the book as an object, Siglio is releasing its third book authored by Calle, after The Address Book (2012) and Suite Vénitienne (2015). Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. The Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective in 2009, and her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.

After finding a lost address book, the artist sets out to understand its owner by randomly interviewing contacts to learn more about the personality and past of its owner.

No stranger to the art of staging and to the act of disclosure, Sophie Caile returns again here to the theme of autobiography and to the notion of the Other, revealing in all their difference and singularity those who have been blind since birth or who have gone blind following an accident. By establishing a dialectic between the testimonies of several generations of blind people and the photographs taken by her on the basis on these accounts, Sophie Caile offers readers a reflection on absence, on the loss of one sense and the compensation of another, on the notion of the visible and the invisible. In this publication, she revisits three earlier works constructed and conceived around the idea ofblindness, setting up a dialogue between them; in Les Aveugles (The Blind), created in 1986, she questioned blind people on their representation of beauty; in 1991, in La Couleur aveugle (Blind Colour), she asked non-sighted people what they perceived and compared their descriptions to artists musings on the monochrome; La Dernière Image (The Last Image), produced in 2010 in Istanbul, historically dubbed the city of the blind, gives a voice to men and women who have lost their sight, questioning them on the last image they can remember, their last memory of the visible world. The work, which is structured as an introspective triptych, uncovers sensibilities, perceptions and events that are painful, sincere. Sophie Calles idea is to underline the permanence and irony of a particular situation, with the aim of redeeming and highlighting the importance of sight.

"This volume, presenting Calle's installation of Rachel Monique at the Palais de Tokyo, was designed in close collaboration with the artist." -- from www.artbook.com/9782365111171.html (viewed 20 October 2017).

Artwork by Sophie Calle. Text by Paul Auster.

"True Stories gathers a series of short autobiographical texts and photos by Sophie Calle. ... The first section is composed of various reflections on objects such as a shoe, a postcard, a bathrobe and a bed, or musings on the artist's body, such as "The Love Letter" ... The second section of the book, "The Husband," is comprised of ten recollections of episodes from Calle's first marriage, by turns funny ("He was an unreliable man. For our first date he showed up one year late"), erotic and sad. A third section gathers various autobiographical tales, and the book closes with three interlinked stories titled "Monique." This new edition includes five new photo-text presentations and is the first English translation."--Artbook.com (accessed September 16, 2014)