Learning Specialist, Carolina Malagamba: This is a piece that takes up an entire room. My favorite way of looking at it is just…walk up to whichever photo draws my attention, and then circle the room and look at all the different pieces.
This series is called Les Dormeurs, which means The Sleepers, and it is by French artist Sophie Calle. She sees herself as an observer and started taking photos of people on the streets, making notes, even following strangers here and there, just as a means of understanding other people.
Artist, Sophie Calle: It was not an artistic work. It was just a way to meet again with my city and do something. After a while, I decided to really become more professional. So I started to make a little lab in my house to print those photos with a girlfriend. And one night she came back—she had been working all night—she mentioned she was tired and she would like to sleep in my bed. It gave me the idea to have my bed occupied during one week.
So I invited people I didn’t know to come and sleep in my bed. Each person would come stay [for] eight hours. I took a photograph every hour and made a kind of questionnaire because I was afraid of those unknown people in my bed, and I was afraid of the silence.
Carolina Malagamba: Something that is interesting about this piece to me is that she uses photography, which is a tool that, originally, was invented for scientific documentation. And then periodically these photos are punctuated by framed texts that tell a short story, or they add information about the person, the subject that is observed.
What do you think the artist was trying to tell us?