CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/7/2024

Long before social media, Sophie Calle fearlessly overshared

“Because revenge is a dish best served cold.” So reads the text on the curtain that covers Sophie Calle’s “Mother-Father” (2018), reproduced here from Overshare, the catalogue to Calle’s traveling retrospective, on view now at the Walker Art Center. Death and mortality have been a running theme in Calle’s work, including this series, begun in the 1990s, in which she photographed headstones that read “Mother” or “Father” without any other identifiers. In other series, she famously spied on people in the street, invited them to sleep in her bed, or snooped through their belongings while working as a hotel maid. She traced the dissolution of her romantic relationship. She collated personal ads. She documented people seeing the ocean for the first time. “Calle has centered the personal, the intimate, and the emotional while refusing to cede judgment to anyone else on what’s too much or what goes too far,” Henriette Huldisch writes. “There is nothing accidental or involuntary in Calle’s way of oversharing—a word she would certainly never use. Calle is always in full control of which stories she chooses to tell. She shows us better than anyone that perhaps oversharers know what they’re doing.”