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of the situation over to Calle. Simply to allow oneself to be watched in this way is an expression of trust. Calle
therefore imposes, crosses and blurs social and personal boundaries in this project; as she monitors and
records her subjects, Calle’s position as watcher is a privileged one, which is reminiscent of the ‘panoptic gaze’
described by Foucault in Discipline and Punish. In Foucault’s words, Calle’s are the ‘eyes that must see without
being seen.’ 12 And the presence and use of the camera is directly relevant to this also because, firstly,
photographs have an assumed evidentiary power; secondly because the camera is a device that records realistic
images that would (visually) give away the identities of Calle’s participants; 13 and lastly because the
photographer is free to make selections. This final point seems particularly relevant. As Sontag (1979: 4) puts
it, ‘[t]o photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to
the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power.’ Indeed, it has been said that, typically in her
projects, Calle ‘chooses to become involved in a random situation, but from the moment of entry she controls
the situation with obsessive manipulation and reports about it in a systematic, calculated manner and in a cool,
aloof style.’ (Guralnik, p. 216). The Sleepers epitomises this description of Calle’s method.
Controversy
In playing with boundaries in such ways, Calle has sometimes courted controversy with her projects. Perhaps
the most famous example is The Address Book (2003 [1983]), in which Calle tells of how, one summer’s day, she
found an address book on the ‘rue des Martyrs’ in Paris. 14 Despite noticing that, sensibly, the owner (‘Pierre D.’)
had written ‘his name, last name, address and phone number’ on the ‘first page’ (Calle, 1996, p. 110), Calle
elected not to contact him directly, but to photocopy the book before sending it back to him and then
proceeding to work her way gradually towards an understanding of him by contacting his friends and
acquaintances and building-up a composite picture of him based on their descriptions of his physical and
personal characteristics. The technical term for this use of texts in building a kind of image (or the use of one
artistic medium to produce another) is ‘ekphrasis,’ 15 and it is another example of how Calle plays with text,
image and imagination in the conceptualisation and materialisation of her work. Calle arranged meetings with
many of the individuals listed in the book, only revealing the name of its owner during the meetings
themselves.
Eventually, over the course of a month, she serialised ‘an alternative portrait’ of Pierre in the French newspaper
Libération along with photographs of the informants, or of the places where the meetings took place. 16
Discovering this on his return from a trip after filming wildlife in Norway, Pierre was furious. He published a
nude photograph of Calle and threatened to sue her if she continued to invade his privacy by ‘reproducing the
Libération pieces in book form’ (Saint, p. 126). The Address Book epitomises the mischievous nature of Calle’s
work as she regularly flirts with controversy, pushing or obscuring the boundaries of social (and sometimes
legal) acceptability. Texts and photographs are always fully integrated into this. As media forms, texts and
photographs are powerful records and testimonies; in a word, both have evidentiary value or potential, and
they are used by Calle as central components in order to exploit the situation at hand. Despite the measure of
anonymity initially afforded to him, Pierre D.’s objections were clearly based on the power and potential of
photographs and texts to represent and misrepresent events and individuals, especially in a public context such
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