Book Review Record 2 Photographs by Daido Moriyama Reviewed by Brian Arnold "The first book I got by Daido Moriyama was '71 New York, published by Andrew Roth and PPP Editions in 2002. This was a great introduction to the photographer’s work — the size and density of a brick, the book is a relentless barrage of photographic dissonance showing a life on the brink..."

Record 2 by Daido Moriyama.

Record 2
Photographs by Daido Moriyama

Thames & Hudson, London, United Kingdom, 2024. 352 pp., 270 illustrations, 8¼x11".

The first book I got by Daido Moriyama was '71 New York, published by Andrew Roth and PPP Editions in 2002. This was a great introduction to the photographer’s work — the size and density of a brick, the book is a relentless barrage of photographic dissonance showing a life on the brink. The rich, grainy black-and-white pictures describe a hunter on the prowl — not for game, but for an understanding of the phenomenology of being and day-to-day life in New York. The pictures also struck me as the work of an outlaw; the first time I paged through '71 New York, I felt I could smell the whiskey, cigarettes, and hypo. When Moriyama went to New York in 1971, he didn’t speak English, and spent his days just as you would imagine, making hundreds of pictures of life on the streets. He must have stayed up all night processing his pictures, because he also made a series of books of his daily musings, xeroxing his darkroom prints to make cheap and crude reproductions, bound collections of photographs (though I might prefer anti-photographs) that he gave away to people he met during his stay. PPP Editions revisited these pictures, making a beautifully produced book that epitomizes Moriyama’s vision.

The second Moriyama book I got was Memories of a Dog (Nazraeli Press, 2004), a collection of essays the photographer wrote in the 1980s for Asahi Camera, a series he conceived as a regular contributor to the magazine. Each issue Moriyama provided short text/image documents that portrayed his wanderings across Japan. The essays were largely written on his train rides before and after the shoots, juxtaposed with pictures made on location. Memories of a Dog shares just the essays, understanding that they are great pieces of photographic literature in and of themselves. Indeed, I was surprised the first time I read it because I was imaging something rough like his pictures, but instead found some deep, reflective thinking about the nature of photography, place, and memory.

I still consider both these books among my favorites today; from the beginning I’ve loved the raw, anti-photography sentiment in ’71 New York — really all his early work — and the surprisingly reflective, patient, and articulate voice found in Memories of a Dog. Together they show what I’ve learned most from Moriyama, to pursue photography in a way that is raw, relentless, and aggravated, like an assault but tempered by a reflective and emotional intelligence.

The new book from Thames & Hudson, Record 2, reproduces a series of self-published magazines called Record that Moriyama produced between 2016-2020, issues #31-50. Each issue starts with a short piece of writing and is then followed by pictures that represent the time between the publications. In many ways, Record 2 represents so much of what I’ve come to love about the photographer’s work — dark and gritty pictures made with insatiable hunger. This compendium is beautifully produced — bound with a slipcase, the pages are rich, glossy black-and-white images, each one offering another complex, passionate photograph. I remember seeing some of the original printings of Record at Dashwood, so feel confident in saying the Thames & Hudson edition provides a lovely interpretation of the work. It is made with the same glossy production values, bound in a way that makes it a substantial, definitive archive of the artist’s work, but still represents the quick and urgent feel that embodied the xeroxes in New York City. That feel, the sense of urgency, is a lovely characteristic of Moriyama’s work, and it is an achievement to make such a prestigious, highly-produced monograph that maintains that sensibility.

My favorite part of Record 2 is the writing. The pictures are superlative, no doubt, but there is something so rigid and stylistic about Moriyama’s approach. The short texts, however, have an informal, conversational appeal, like he’s talking to you on the train. In them we witness Moriyama reflecting on ideas developed during his friendship with Takuma Nakahira; things he learned from Bruce Davidson, Eikoh Hosoi, Nobuyoshi Araki, and Eraserhead; the COVID lockdown; and receiving the Hasselblad Award. These things clarify Moriyama’s achievement for me; he was a street photographer who made Winogrand look lazy, constantly making pictures in a dark gritty manner while watching life unfold on the streets of Japan from post-war reconstruction through the ambitious expansion of the 1970s, its emergence as a global economic force in the 1990s, and into the age of data. Throughout it all, he maintained a restless, independent voice, and created a photographic vision that feels as raw as The Ramones and as wise as Zen.

Thames & Hudson is creating a multivolume series chronicling Record. I’ve only seen this second installment, but I am eager for more. If you really want to explore Moriyama’s writing, I still recommend Memories of a Dog, and if you are new to his work, I’d really encourage you to find his earlier books. Nevertheless, Record 2 is another testament to the mastery and depth of the photographer’s work and accomplishments.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

Brian Arnold is a photographer, writer, and translator based in Ithaca, NY. He has taught and exhibited his work around the world and published books, including A History of Photography in Indonesia, with Oxford University Press, Cornell University, Amsterdam University, and Afterhours Books. Brian is a two-time MacDowell Fellow and in 2014 received a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation/American Institute for Indonesian Studies.

Book Review Soft Eyes Photographs by Henry Wessel, Austin Leong & Adrian Martinez Reviewed by Jacques Talbot "Soft Eyes presents a selection of photographs by the late Henry Wessel, alongside those by California-based photographers Austin Leong and Adrian Martinez, in an immaculately designed and thoughtfully curated volume that synthesizes rather than juxtaposes the unique sensibilities of these remarkable photographers..."

Soft Eyes by Henry Wessel, Austin Leong & Adrian Martinez.

Soft Eyes
Henry Wessel, Austin Leong & Adrian Martinez
Deadbeat Club, Los Angeles, CA, 2024. 84 pp., 11½x11½".

Soft Eyes presents a selection of photographs by the late Henry Wessel, alongside those by California-based photographers Austin Leong and Adrian Martinez, in an immaculately designed and thoughtfully curated volume that synthesizes rather than juxtaposes the unique sensibilities of these remarkable photographers.

In 1969, at the age of twenty-seven, Wessel arrived in California from Rochester, New York. He settled in Point Richmond and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for the next forty years. Leong (b. 1990) and Martinez (b. 1990) grew up in Anaheim and Los Angeles respectively, both relocating to San Francisco in the five-year window between 2003 and 2008. What unifies these three photographers is their affinity for capturing California’s crisp, stark light on the textured surfaces of their surroundings. This carries through the selection of photographs, which are sequenced without accompanying dates or attributions. The photographs retrace the neighborhoods Wessel once frequented, and to which Leong and Martinez now turn their lenses.

Throughout Soft Eyes, there is a noticeable contrast between the photographs that convey the expanse of California’s car-friendly terrain and those that capture interpersonal encounters. This mirrors how Wessel frequently took photographs from his car but on occasion would emerge from his vehicle to make further frames on foot. Like Wessel, Leong’s work is occasionally framed by the passenger-side door or windscreen of his car. At other times, individual subjects fill the composition. In an interesting triangulation of images, Wessel depicts a woman resting upon a blanket spread in disarray upon the sand. Later, the shadow of Leong’s bicycled figure encroaches on a man splayed on the sidewalk, apparently sunbathing. In a subsequent frame, Martinez focuses upon a child lying awkwardly, and somewhat ominously, at the foot of a staircase leading to the beach. In each instance, the ambiguity invites us to draw our own conclusions.

Interstitial space, where the built environment abuts abundant natural growth, is another theme throughout Soft Eyes. To this end, Martinez depicts foliage perforating a geodesic dome containing the remainder of a tree, suggesting a glacial transference of power. Elsewhere, in a photograph by Leong, a large plant appears to explode through the breeze-block wall of a parking lot; the shadows of its fronds radiate outward, as if from the percussive force of the impact. Several frames later, in an image of a suburban homestead by Wessel, a shrub that has had one quadrant abruptly excised is made whole again by its own shadow. These slower images perhaps best exemplify Wessel’s conviction that the meaning of a photograph is elucidated from a combination of its appearance, the experiential knowledge of the viewer, and the viewer’s imagination.

Time and again, humor serves as the inter-connective tissue between the work of Leong, Martinez, and Wessel. In the yard of a bungalow, a small cat sits discreetly against a white picket fence. Nearby, a hanging sign reads “Little Honker’. Elsewhere, the outline of a leg, whose figure vanishes into the walled entrance of a property, is mimicked by the trailing arm of a plant that projects outward from the same property, casting a wide arc from above the street as if to avoid detection. A few frames later, the larger of two dogs peers into the dark interior of a structure through missing slats at the base of one of its doors. Meanwhile, a smaller canine peers down on it, apparently undetected, from the apex of its roof. These photographs exemplify each photographer’s acute receptivity to narrative within the infinite and forever evolving permutations of their surroundings.

Soft Eyes culminates in an insightful essay by curator Allie Haeusslein, which dives deeper into the actively receptive state of ‘soft eyes’, a phrase coined by Wessel. He spoke at length about the importance of making an image as soon as interest registers, without deliberation or further investigation. Multiple works by Leong and Martinez demonstrate their adherence to this approach, and this overarching connection serves as the progenitor of the connections that follow:

“You’re kind of like a free agent between your instinct, your anticipation, and your intelligence, and all of those things… keep continually moving back and forth in a fluid way while you’re photographing”.

Soft Eyes is Todd Hido’s choice for Favorite Photobook of 2024, appearing alongside three other titles from standout publisher Deadbeat Club. Soft Eyes, however, is unique for drawing together the work of three photographers within a volume that is undeniably greater than the sum of its parts. The images by Leong, Martinez, and Wessel are shaped in part by California’s sunlight, but more so by Wessel’s philosophy. For these reasons, Soft Eyes has also proven to be my favorite photobook of 2024.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

Jacques Talbot is a photographer and writer based in Kingston, Ontario. His writing can be found in Border Crossings, Sculpture magazine, and the American Review of Canadian Studies.

Book Review My America Photographs by Diana Matar Reviewed by Arturo Soto "How did it come to be that so many citizens in the United States distrust the keepers of public order? Diana Matar’s photobook My America, about police brutality in the United States, doesn’t explain why this problem has persisted to the point of becoming representative of its society, nor does it attempt to disentangle its systemic nature..."

My America by Diana Matar.

My America
Diana Matar
GOST Books, London, UK, 2024. 304 pp., 110 images, 8x10".

How did it come to be that so many citizens in the United States distrust the keepers of public order? Diana Matar’s photobook My America, about police brutality in the United States, doesn’t explain why this problem has persisted to the point of becoming representative of its society, nor does it attempt to disentangle its systemic nature. This is a painful subject to broach, so instead of showing the violent acts that enrage and leave us feeling powerless, it gathers facts that condemn the police’s betrayal of confidence against the very people it’s supposed to protect. Not every victim included here was innocent, but Matar’s examination makes it clear that the concepts of law and justice are too often on divergent paths, with the police working as sovereign executioners facing little consequences for their actions.

The countless cases of police brutality captured on camera — whether by citizen journalists, security, home, or body cameras — prove that what’s upsetting to watch in fiction, think of the pivotal scene in the film Widows that’s the source of the protagonists’ trauma, can be barely tolerable to watch when it actually happened. The problem is that these images take a toll on us, and if we look away when they have worn us down, we might stop meditating on the reasons why this violence is allowed to exist. Yet, as important as this subject is, it’s undeniably a challenge to make work about topics so overwhelmingly unambiguous, a conundrum Matar has previously experienced. Her first book Evidence, about her father-in-law’s forced disappearance in Libya, also investigated how ordinary landscapes intersect with state-sponsored violence. In this sense, My America continues Matar’s attempt to understand the emotional repercussions that these incidents can have on our perception of the landscape.

The book has a minimalist design, as if Matar wanted to avoid any expressive elements colliding with its somber topic. An introductory statement by the artist is followed by a transcript of an incident in which police officers shoot a person suffering from the aftereffects of his medication. Then, a section explaining the project’s genesis closes this long (and uncommon) textual prelude to the photographs. We encounter an equally sparse layout in the book’s main section. The right page registers the victim’s name, the years of their birth and death, and the city where the incident happened. The facing page features a picture of that place. These conceptual diptychs constitute the bulk of the book. When, despite her best efforts, Matar couldn’t locate the spot in question, she photographed the sky instead. The flow of pictures is interrupted in the middle by a section on statistics relating to mental health, accountability, gun ownership, and other pertinent categories. These text pages are printed on a different stock than the photographs, which adds to the material complexity of the publication.

Matar used an iPhone for practical reasons rather than her usual medium-format camera. This decision allowed her to operate quickly, but it also ties the images to the production, distribution, and consumption dynamics of citizen journalism. Her methodology, which deserves its own section at the end of the book, was to constrain the project to California, Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. The former are the states in which most people died as a result of police brutality during the period covered by the book, while the latter are the states with the highest number of deaths per capita. Matar was interested in finding out whether these events had left a trace in the landscape and was shocked to discover that only seven out of the roughly three hundred sites she photographed had any kind of memorial, with the remaining ones bearing no evidence of the violent acts that happened there. Matar claims that she wasn’t pursuing the precision demanded of forensic photographers, although she did want to capture the place where the body had rested since what is present in the frames relates to the implications of what we can understand, read, or decode from the landscape (an exercise in subjective looking implied in the title).

Each case is described in more detail at the end of the book, and the publication date was pushed back because of the implications of the text’s terminology. For instance, the term “fatal interaction” had to be used to avoid legal troubles, which shows how jargon is used by the offending party to soften the harshness of this social problem and muddle their accountability. In this sense, including this long textual section is vital to the book’s intent, with many of these accounts underscoring a corruption the American government has never owned up to. In a particularly egregious case, a woman suffering from mental health issues threatens an officer with a log, for which she gets fatally tasered. However, the Custodial Death Report states she died from a drug overdose. The repetitive lack of justice in the stories suggests that if you are poor or have a mental health condition, the chances of getting shot by the police during a confrontation are very high.

My America is a timely indictment of a sociopolitical malaise that has affected the US for too long, but the author’s good intentions don’t mean the book is beyond criticism. While the statistics and texts turn it into a politically committed artwork, they also render it somewhat dry. This textual framework is congruent with Matar’s activist past, but readers must decide if this information is too didactic. Reading cases of police brutality back-to-back can also be emotionally draining, even demoralizing. As such, the responsibility of the book’s subtlety and depth are left to the images because of their implicit indeterminacy, with the interpretive possibilities lying in those aspects they contain but cannot state explicitly. Photographs, unlike words, cannot be reduced to a discourse of social justice, so what these pictures say collectively is less clear. Their raison d’etre is indivisible from the texts that accompany them, and yet, since the landscape of murder is indistinguishable from the landscape of everyday life, photographs contain the possibility of affecting us in different and unplanned ways.

In other words, the book’s emotional core derives from reading, not looking. Matar claims she didn’t place the texts alongside the photographs, like in Sternfeld’s On this Site, because she wanted to create a memorial to the victims so that they weren’t defined by how they died. The result is a hermetic visual structure that could have benefited from a wider variety of textual and visual elements that made its proposition more ambiguous. As it stands, indignation and grief seem like the only fitting reactions. Engineering such a calibrated response is characteristic of melodrama, which tends to elicit a narrow spectrum of emotions due to the equally narrow display of sentiments in its narrative construction. This book is not melodramatic per se, but the key to having a more aesthetically ambiguous experience lies in spending time with the pictures, which are less prescriptive. In her statement, Matar questions whether landscapes can “hold memory.” Anyone who has visited their childhood home or primary school will likely share an answer, but we can expect photographs to do even more, which is, in the end, what Matar was after in this captivating book.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

Arturo Soto is a Mexican photographer and writer. He has published the photobooks In the Heat (2018) and A Certain Logic of Expectations (2021). Soto holds a PhD in Fine Art from the University of Oxford, and postgraduate degrees in photography and art history from the School of Visual Arts in New York and University College London.

Book Review Berlin on a Dog’s Night Photographs by Gundula Schulze Eldowy Reviewed by Blake Andrews “It’s been over thirty years since the reunification of East and West Germany. But some major GDR photographers are still woefully under-recognized in the West. Gundula Schulze Eldowy is a prime example..."

Berlin on a Dog’s Night by Gundula Schulze Eldowy.

Berlin on a Dog’s Night
Photographs by Gundula Schulze Eldowy
Spector Books, 2024. 340 pp., 320 illustrations, 8½x10¾x1¼".

It’s been over thirty years since the reunification of East and West Germany. But some major GDR photographers are still woefully under-recognized in the West. Gundula Schulze Eldowy is a prime example. Born in Erfurt in 1954, her career roughly straddled the forty-year lifespan of East Germany, before continuing into the present via Japan, Moscow, Turkey, New York, Bolivia, and other destinations. Even today as a septuagenarian, she remains a globetrotting whirlwind who has never stopped moving. Wiki lists her current residence as “Berlin and Peru”. Did I mention she once discovered an unknown shaft in the Great Pyramid of Egypt? Or that she is an accomplished poet? Or befriended Robert Frank in the 1980s?

Schulze Eldowy’s restless spirit manifested from an early age. After settling in East Berlin in 1972, she traveled extensively behind the Iron Curtain during the seventies, a camera always at her side. Gradually her energies galvanized around her adopted home city, where she probed the local alleys, evenings, and residents. Her gritty b/w photographs of Berlin’s underbelly were eventually compiled into the multi-year project Berlin in einer Hundenacht, which translates to English as Berlin on a Dog’s Night.

Published as a book in 2011 by Lehmstedt Verlag, Berlin on a Dog’s Night made a minor splash in America and Europe. It remains her signature work, and if you know her photos at all, it is likely through this monograph. Unfortunately, as happens too often with first edition photobooks, it has fallen out of print and become relatively hard to find. Meanwhile, a belated wave of interest in GDR photographers has been gaining steam, cresting at Rencontres d'Arles with the group exhibition Restless Bodies: East German Photography 1980-1989, curated by Sonia Voss in 2019. Gundula Schulze Eldowy was one of several legendary elders included, along with Ulrich Wüst, Gabriele Stötzer, Ute Mahler, and many more.

The timing feels ripe for rediscovery, and Spector has jumped on the moment with a new edition of Berlin on a Dog’s Night. It’s a handsome grey hardback, dense with more than 300 pages of b/w photos. The fusty original cover image has been replaced with bold yellow lettering, and the original contents supplemented with dozens of extra photos. In addition to Berlin on a Dog’s Night, there are short selections from other projects. We’ll get to those in a moment, but first the title series, which occupies the first 2/3 of the book.

Berlin on a Dog’s Night was a wide ranging series of photos shot between 1977-1990. As sequenced in the book, the dates are jumbled into a timeless trail of broken scenes. Like a stray hound, Schulze Eldowy poked her nose just about everywhere. One photo captures anguished kids huddled on a sidewalk. Another shows a messy domestic interior. Street portraits in passing capture pedestrians looking back at Schulze Eldowy with befuddled stares, hair mussed, shirts untucked. Photos of coke-bottle glasses, clotheslines, and litter blend with brick facades and overgrown lots for layers of squalor. It’s a dog’s eye view of Berlin indeed, and a grimy feral mutt at that.

During the Cold War, the GDR was proudly keen to show its good side to the world. Schulze Eldowy did not fit the state’s aims, and the German Stasi sometimes put roadblocks in her way. But Schulze Eldowy persisted. In fact she may have gone a step overboard in subverting the GDR’s self mythology. Did East Berlin actually look this shabby in real life? Perhaps not. But if she took artistic license, the ends justified the means. Every picture supported her singular and poetic vision. Add a filter of grainy monochrome on flat matte pages, and this book encapsulates the dull routine of life in the former Iron Curtain better than any other photobook.

I’ve mentioned Schulze Eldowy’s restless spirit, and it seems she was usually juggling a few things at once. Overlapping with the 70s-80s timeline of Berlin on a Dog’s Night were various other photo projects including The Wind Fills Itself With Water, Nude Portraits, Work, and Tamerlan. Samplings of each one are included here, with 10 or 20 photos per series. From this limited selection it’s hard to discern how extensive these projects were, if they deserved their own books (none were published as monographs), or if they were mere side projects. My guess is the former. If there isn’t quite enough material for a proper analysis, there’s certainly enough to spark curiosity. Each of the extra chapters tantalizes with strong photography. They include wonderfully strange nudes, industrial labor scenes, and an intimate view of an aging friend. They may range in subject, but their honest vulnerability jibes perfectly with the title project’s unsettling overtones. The book’s design helps integrate everything into a whole, dispensing with chapter headings so that one series bleeds into the next. (Captions and series titles are reserved for a double spread near the beginning.)

Schulze Eldowy’s photos are descriptive and powerful. They’d be enough on their own for a dynamite book. The good news is they’re packaged here with an added bonus. A delightful introductory essay by Schulze Eldowy recounts some of her life story, with anecdotes about photography, friends, and adventures in blunt language. It’s a fantastic piece of first-person prose, informative, intimate, and memoiristic, a proper match for the pictures. Together they make the new Berlin on a Dog’s Night a treat. Hopefully this book will introduce Schulze Eldowy’s work to new audiences and a new generation. I’m happy to count myself among the freshly converted.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

Blake Andrews is a photographer based in Eugene, OR. He writes about photography at blakeandrews.blogspot.com.

Book Review The Sleepers Photographs by Sophie Calle Reviewed by Britland Tracy “It’s 5:00pm on Monday, April 1st, 1979, and Sophie Calle has one rule: her bed must be occupied at all times, between now and 10:00am next Monday. She has a plan, or so she thinks, because she has meticulously scheduled twenty-seven friends, friends-of-friends, and curious or bored strangers to come over to her apartment and sleep in her bed with the chronological synchronicity of a relay race..."

The Sleepers 

by Sophie Calle. 

The Sleepers
Photographs by Sophie Calle
Siglio Press, 2024. 304 pp., 6x8".

It’s 5:00pm on Sunday, April 1st, 1979, and Sophie Calle has one rule: her bed must be occupied at all times, between now and 10:00am next Monday. She has a plan, or so she thinks, because she has meticulously scheduled twenty-seven friends, friends-of-friends, and curious or bored strangers to come over to her apartment and sleep in her bed with the chronological synchronicity of a relay race. Logistically, she has prepared a menu to offer upon arrival or departure, fresh sheets if desired, a voice recorder, a camera, and a questionnaire through which these volunteers will divulge everything from their dreams to their occupations to their histories of bed-wetting. Symbolically, she has purchased a goldfish which will stand watch in her bedroom to demarcate this week of…art? labor? slumber exchange? espionage? That is for the “sleepers” to define.

But, but, but: Bob the Trumpeter needs to take a bath. Graziella and Françoise insist on airing out the room first. Maxine will only settle into a nap if his coworker joins him. X the Babysitter’s jealous fiancé would prefer she take the sofa. Jean-Yves Le Gavre is day-drunk and running three hours behind, Marino is four hours late, and Maggie has altogether disregarded the appointment. Henri-Alexis doesn’t like the magnetic aura of the sheets. Once in bed, their needs lengthen, and nothing short of Valium, sex, silk pajamas, a book, a beer, a gust of fresh air, the radio, a phone call, a cigarette, silence, closed doors, open windows, a wall-and-pillow fortress, and/or their dog will suffice as a tranquilizer. Sophie’s Sleepers are in fact human beings, still very much awake, with eccentricities and predilections and some apprehensions about why exactly they have agreed to crawl into her bed in the first place. And so her game begins.

A Sophie Calle Project is at its best when its initial scheme grows legs and runs circles around itself, persuading happenstance and human error to disrupt the rulebook, and that is precisely what unfolds throughout this week. Her subjects push back. They answer her questions with meandering diatribes or not at all. They’re annoyed or hungry or lusty or not yet tired. They’re laid bare in their idiosyncrasies yet remain impenetrable; they know they’re being watched. Voyeurism is a reciprocal mirror, and the specimens placed under glass have some observations about their examiner: “She’s mad.” / “This needs to stop, this acting like a social lunatic who asks questions and says nothing about herself.” / “Sophie, really, I find this a bit excessive. You’re spying on the most intimate moments. It’s unacceptable. If this is how it’s going to be, we’ll go to sleep.”

To follow the rules and fall asleep in her bed is, ironically, the eject button out of her game. Sleep is the least interesting thing that can happen here.

Les Dormeurs was Calle’s first major project and a harbinger of what was to become of her now half-century career as an artist-writer-investigator of the human condition, and it has at long last arrived stateside as The Sleepers by way of Siglio Press and translator Emma Ramadan. The book itself is an intimate object whose tactility falls somewhere between a pillow and a sacred text, with its cushioned navy cover and three hundred silver gilded pages. It is meant to be read and regarded in equal measure, as images follow the lead of their textual counterparts, cataloging one sleeper after the next and confirming in black-and-white evidence what Calle has recorded in words. Look, there really were people in her bed. This man was a mouth-breather; this woman was nude. A tangle of limbs here; a snuggling cat there. Here they laid awake, smoking cigarettes before breakfast, sipping champagne, reading a newspaper, buttoning a shirt, staring back at the camera, greeting the next in line. The photographs of these gestures are grainy and monotone and satisfying in the way that crime scene photographs are satisfying – not for their technical craftsmanship but rather for the matter-of-fact secrets they reveal for our visual consumption.

It could go without saying that The Sleepers is not about sleeping, but rather those vulnerable, banal threshold moments usually shrouded by the curtain of night and solitude. If there is a narrative to be found in this game, it resides in the very peculiarities that render these participants insubordinate to its “stay in bed” rule – much in the same way a lover’s scrupulous nail clipping routine delivers more intrigue than whether or not they happen to snore. If one dies as one lives, then perhaps sleeping is the next best parallel lens we have onto the precarious business of living.

In the wake of this experiment, Calle would go on to, among other things, excavate occupied hotel rooms under the auspices of a chamber maid; hire a private detective to shadow her; follow a man to Venice for a whisper of a reason; publicly dissect a breakup letter, an abandoned address book, and her own mother’s death with the surgical aloofness that has become her signature affect and greatest tool. But first, she asked people to sleep in her bed, that unruly horizontal stage on which we spend a third of our lives, and documented their prostrate improvisations.

Now it is 10:00am on Monday, April 9th, 1979, and Sophie Calle has made a heap of concessions, inserted herself and her family members as bed doubles for some absentees, and gradually neglected her questionnaire. She has absorbed the trepidations of her sleepers and acquiesced to their chaos. They have run circles around her, and taking their cue, the goldfish has leapt from its bowl to its demise. Her gaze slackens; there is no one left to watch. She strips the sheets. The unraveling becomes this book.

Purchase Book

Read More Book Reviews

Britland Tracy is an artist and educator from the Pacific Northwest whose work engages photography, text, and ephemera to observe the intricacies of human connection and discord. She has published two books, Show Me Yours and Pardon My Creep, and exhibited her work internationally. She holds a BA in French from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Colorado, where she continues to teach remotely for the Department of Critical Media Practices while living in Marfa, Texas.