SHARON HELGASON GALLAGHER | DATE 12/14/2012

Sophie Calle Address Book Tops LA Times Best of 2012 Books Chosen by David Ulin

Daivd Ulin of the LA Times picked Siglio's Sophie Calle: Address Book in his list of the best books of 2012. In his full review of the title, he wrote "It’s fascinating to read the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle’s “The Address Book” in the age of social media. The project, originally published as a serial in the newspaper Libération between Aug. 2 and Sept. 4, 1983 — and translated into English now for the first time — grew out of the most random of occurrences: an address book that Calle found on a Paris street. Calle returned the address book to its owner, a man she identifies as Pierre D., but not before she photocopied its pages so she could contact all his contacts, as it were.... Pierre is both not real to us and utterly real to us — a compendium of anecdotes, of images, that provoke our fantasies, even as we confront the violation (of privacy, of discretion) at the project’s heart. The same could be said of Facebook or Twitter, where the public display of our address books, our diaries, our relationships — manipulated to create a certain set of impressions — both reveal and conceal us at once. In Calle’s pursuit of Pierre, then, we get a glimpse of the future that we now inhabit, suspended between reality and the image of reality, between a life and the impression of a life." Read the full review. For more sophisticated gift suggestions, see our Holiday Gift Guide.