With Blind, French conceptual artist Sophie Calle (born 1953) revisits three earlier works constructed around the idea of blindness. In “Les Aveugles” (“The Blind”), created in 1986, she questioned blind people on their representation of beauty; in 1991, in “La Couleur Aveugle” (“Blind Color”), she asked blind people about their imagination of perception and compared their descriptions to artists’ musings on the monochrome; “La Dernière Image” (“The Last Image”), produced in 2010 in Istanbul, involved questioning people who had lost their sight on the last image they could remember. By establishing a dialectic between the testimonies of several generations of blind people and Calle’s photographs based on these accounts, the artist offers readers a reflection on absence, on the loss of one sense and the compensation of another and on the notion of the visible and the invisible.
Featured image, from Sophie Calle's The Last Image series (2010), is reproduced from Blind. Of the series, Calle writes, "I met blind people whose loss of sight had been sudden. I asked them to describe to me the last thing I saw." The image is captioned, in traditional print and Braille, "There is no last image – my loss of eyesight was gradual – but there is an image that remains, the one that's missing: three children that I can't see, sitting side by side, facing me, on the living-room sofa, where you are now."
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
T Magazine
Mary Kaye Schilling
Offer[s] reflections on absence, on the loss of one sense and its compensation by another, and on the idea of the visible and the invisible.
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With Blind, French conceptual artist Sophie Calle (born 1953) revisits three earlier works constructed around the idea of blindness. In “Les Aveugles” (“The Blind”), created in 1986, she questioned blind people on their representation of beauty; in 1991, in “La Couleur Aveugle” (“Blind Color”), she asked blind people about their imagination of perception and compared their descriptions to artists’ musings on the monochrome; “La Dernière Image” (“The Last Image”), produced in 2010 in Istanbul, involved questioning people who had lost their sight on the last image they could remember. By establishing a dialectic between the testimonies of several generations of blind people and Calle’s photographs based on these accounts, the artist offers readers a reflection on absence, on the loss of one sense and the compensation of another and on the notion of the visible and the invisible.
