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as that of a national newspaper. Regardless of the accuracy or inaccuracy of her alternative portrait of him,
Pierre regarded Calle’s prying into his life as an invasion of his privacy. This is how Calle’s use of texts and
images can be said to sometimes raise ethical questions.
Standard Commentaries
To paraphrase Walter Benjamin on the art of critique, in order to know what one can write in relation to ‘a
subject’ of interest one has to know what has already been written because such knowledge is not only a way of
‘informing oneself,’ but also, more practically, of enabling the possibility of making an original contribution to
the particular set of discourses at hand. 17 This is a guiding principle for my discussion of Calle’s work, with
which a number of themes are often associated.
Firstly, Calle’s work often blurs the boundaries between the public and the private. For example, according to
Vest Hansen, ‘Calle operates as a catalyst for ‘ordinary people’s’ autobiographical stories to represent and
question public places and private spaces.’ Secondly, it is often pointed out that Calle blurs the distinction
between art and documentary. Garnett notes that, although Calle ‘doesn’t paint or draw or sculpt, and she
doesn’t exactly make things or make things up,’ her ‘images tend to be documentary style photographs, and the
text is narrative, explanatory and personal, even when it is about someone else.’ Lastly, it is also well known
that in Calle’s life and work, fact and fiction have become intertwined. As a result of their romantic involvement,
for instance, Calle collaborated with the writer Paul Auster on numerous projects and she was the inspiration
for a character, ‘Maria,’ that Auster developed in his novel Leviathan (1992). 18 ‘After reading the novel,’ Duguid
notes, ‘Calle decided to try and become the character, to recreate the parts of Maria that Auster had made up.’ 19
As we have seen, and as we shall see further, reflections on the use of texts and photographs form part of these
standard commentaries on Calle. Using these media forms, Calle’s works are essentially investigations into the
social world and the reality of the lives that comprise it; this gives her work a sociological dimension, taking it
beyond the realms of art. I am also addressing this range of themes associated with Calle’s work, but I am doing
so in the context of lamination.
Texts and Photographs: Lamination
The title of my PhD thesis is Lamination: re-thinking collaborations of photographs and texts. The concept of
‘lamination’ is inspired by an observation by the French cultural critic Roland Barthes on the construction of
the paper photograph as a ‘laminated object whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them
both.’ 20 Barthes’ main concern in making this observation, though, is not the photograph itself but the referent
or image inside it – this is the photograph’s essence, its meaning, because in Camera Lucida Barthes is concerned
not with semiotic interpretations of photographs via textual explanations and interceptions, but with the
significance of the sheer presences within them. According to Rancière, Camera Lucida therefore represents a
radical break from Barthes’ earlier preoccupation with a cautious, semiological critique of photographic images
as ‘mythological’ objects. 21 That is, in this case, as objects whose meanings are culturally-specific, but whose
communicable potential (via the realism of their image) allows them to be paraded as self-explanatory
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