The Shadow

Item

Title
The Shadow
Description
In April 1981, a detective followed the French artist Sophie Calle through the streets of Paris for one day. Hired by her mother at the artist’s request, the detective logged her movements and photographed her activities as she, without his knowledge, recorded her experience of being watched. She later exhibited the reports side-by-side in her piece “La Filature” (“The Shadow,” 1981), which highlights Calle’s method of working over three decades. Staging provocations resembling seduction, documenting them with snapshot photography and a forensic first-person point of view, she crosses the thresholds of voyeur and exhibitionist, public and private, conceptual control and chance.
Creator
Calle, Sophie
Date
1981
Type
photographs and text
Extent
75 x 115 inches
place of creation
Paris
place of repository
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Identifier
93.66
Has Version
version in french: "La Filature"
Item sets
Surveillance Art
Media
calle;shadow