Erwin Blumenfeld. Introduction by Emmanuelle

Introduction by Clément Chéroux

Sophie Calle

 PHOTO  POCHE

12.5 × 19 cm 176 pages 117 black and white and color photographs softback photo poche n° 101 october 2022 retail price: 15.90 €

Born in 1970, Clément Chéroux is a historian of photography and has been the chief curator at New York’s moma since 2020, after holding the roles of head curator at the Paris’ Centre Pompidou and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His first book, L’Expérience photographique d’August Strindberg: du naturalisme au surnaturalisme, was published in 1994 by Actes Sud. He also wrote the introduction to Joan Fontcuberta’s “Photo Poche” anthology. Whether she is hiring private detectives to spy on her and report back her whereabouts, interviewing the blind about the last image they remember, or using small ads to trigger narrative, Sophie Calle loves stories, the ones she tells and the ones she collects. She invents her own meticulous protocols which often turns into rituals. Above all, she adores chance encounters, striking coincidences, and what, since Apollinaire and the Surrealists, has been called “the poetics of surprise”. She sets up situations with no other goal than to create the unexpected. With her distinct taste for risk taking, the artist reveals lives as much as she unveils herself to spotlight the extraordinary within the apparently ordinary. In his introduction, curator Clément Chéroux describes her quest as a search for the “ultimate point” where oppositions like reality versus imagination, reflexes

versus control, presence versus absence, concealment versus revelation, play versus death cease to be antagonistic.

To celebrate her iconoclastic work and the 40th anniversary of “Photo Poche”, Sophie Calle joins the series with an exceptional volume of 176 pages, numbered 101, which had been mysteriously omitted from the list until now.