Surveillance

Sophie Calle

Surveillance; an impersonal type of photography, its evolution continues all the time and all around us by means of cctv.

The Hotel (1981)

Sophie Calle's approach is almost a diaristic way of informing experience and personalising this abstract and distant form of image making. In her project The Hotel (1981) Calle had to become an employee of a hotel in Venice, gaining her access to the guest’s rooms and their personal positions. Like a detective or crime photographer, she photographs the momentarily unoccupied hotel rooms: she photographs the unmade or never slept in beds, the stray items left in bathrooms, the contents of suitcases and closets; she reads letters left lying in the open. The images have a very distant and clinical feel to them; there is no connection between the photographer, the objects or the people who own them. Surveillance is often a means of taking photographs of people when they don’t know it’s happening however Calle, in my opinion has gone a step further by taking pictures of people belongings. The guests almost appear more vulnerable as they are in a hotel and away from their home environment and have only brought with them the few items of personal importance. This invasion of privacy has meant that the viewer is able to see more of the guest on a personal level as in many ways an individual’s belongings can tell you more about someone than themselves in person.