The Sleepers.

Photographs and text by Sophie Calle.

Siglio Press, 2024. 304 pp., 6x8".

In one of Sophie Calle’s first artistic experiments, she invited friends, acquaintances, and strangers to sleep in her bed. Twenty-seven people agreed, among them a baker, a babysitter, an actor, a journalist, a seamstress, a trumpet player, and several painters. Calle photographed them awake and asleep, secretly recording any private conversations once the door closed. She served each a meal, and, if they agreed, subjected them to a questionnaire that probed their personal predilections, habits and dreams, as well as their interpretations of the act of sleeping in her bed: was it a curiosity, a game, a seduction, an artwork, a job? The result, comprising her first exhibition in 1979, was a grid of 198 photographs and brief texts.

Unlike the original installation, this artist’s book iteration of The Sleepers contains not only all the photographs and captions but also her engrossing, novella-like narrative, untranslated until now. Clothbound and pillow-like, the book unfolds as it opens, inviting the reader to join the others in Calle’s bed.

From the single, liminal mise-en-scène of her bedroom, Calle chronicles the sleepers in text and photos, as if in real time, as they inhabit the bed. Their acute and sometimes startling, sometimes endearing particularities accumulate: The Sleepers is as much an outré report on the nature and act of sleeping as it is something like an eight-day-long dream.

Many seeds of Calle’s subsequent works are embedded in The Sleepers: her exacting and transgressive methods of investigation, her cultivation of intimacy and remove, and her generative and unrelenting curiosity. But in this work, as she observes the sleepers, they observe her too: they speak with reciprocal candor, presaging her insouciance and resolve as she detonates boundaries in the works that follow.

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Cat# ZK655H Hardbound $48.00 (978-1-938221-34-7)
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