Sophie Calle Unveils ‘Ideas Which Have Gone Nowhere’

At Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, the French photographer and conceptual artist Sophie Calle presents an assortment of projects deferred or abandoned over the course of her 40-year career. These ‘ideas which have gone nowhere’, as they are described in an introductory wall text, are at last ‘pronounced finished’, though one can never be sure. Calle’s brand of ephemeral art intervention – often produced in secret, without participants’ consent – would seem to evade any definite endpoint. Save one: death.

Her manner of organizing and, of late, terminating her artworks is remarkably unsentimental. In the exhibition’s first room, Calle pairs several fragments and false starts with short text panels explaining why she chose to move on. There’s a photographic study of identical twin brothers, Emmanuel and Maximilien Berque (Twins [Max died], 2025), living by the beach, still dressing alike into their 60s. Calle, who visited them yearly, declined to continue the work after Max’s death: ‘game over’, she writes. In another project, Yes (Infernal) (2025) – a composite photograph of the word ‘Oui’ skywritten on a clear day – Calle toys with the freedom to make choices. For a whole month, she consented to anything and everything; but, after scrolling through her assistant’s inbox, she promptly changed course. ‘I would have taken seven planes,’ she complains, ‘attended five dinners in the same evening, accepted a bad exhibition …’ Her adjudication? ‘INFERNAL.’ Each of Calle’s written descriptions of an abandoned project bears a stamp, in big red letters, with a conclusive statement in the same self-critical tone: ‘TOO LATE’; ‘WHAT’S THE POINT?’; ‘WRONG TURN’; ‘LOSS OF INTEREST’.

A second room is devoted to the strongest work on view: the photo series ‘Picassos in Lockdown’ (2022), which Calle made for the Musée Picasso in Paris. She was invited to create work in dialogue with the master’s drawings and paintings but felt overwhelmed at the prospect. Could even her best, most admired works withstand such a comparison? She agreed only when the museum had shuttered temporarily, and Picasso’s canvases – including Portrait of Marie-Thérèse Walter (1937) and Portrait of Jacques Prévert (1956) – were shrouded in cloth and brown paper: ‘less intimidating’, in Calle’s words, like corpses in a morgue.

The third and final room is different, more emotive, less a demonstration of Calle’s dark sense of humour and exacting intellect. Here, she pays quiet homage to her subjects – her parents, both deceased – with glum self-portraits and photographs of headstones, several of which are set in funereal cherrywood casements. Again, there is textual commentary. She writes of her father, dead at 94, ‘I wanted him to have seen everything.’ She relays a few of his last words, including ‘cypress’, ‘toilets’ and ‘morning’. Elsewhere she excerpts her diary. ‘My mother died today,’ she wrote in 2006. Then: ‘No one will say this about me.’

Calle has been thinking about mortality for some time. Eight years ago, she commissioned actor and writer Adrian Dannatt to pen her obituary, which she displays here in a shadowbox, obscured by a trio of preserved moths (Unforeseen, 2017). But the humanistic problem of ‘legacy’, which is mentioned in the gallery’s press release, is not what Calle’s work evokes. Her reputation as one of the great postmodern image-makers testifies to something impersonal: her native culture’s obsession with documentation and procedure, and the indefinite relation between an event or scenario, and the traces it leaves behind. Once declared finished, her artworks revert to the quotidian matter from which they emerged: receipts, printouts, photo negatives, carbon paper. In a wall text, she describes a life that ends while ideas are left waiting ‘in drawers and boxes’. One day they’ll be emptied and, eventually, the contents will disintegrate.

‘Sophie Calle’ is on view at Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco until 12 April

^{Main image: ‘Sophie Calle’, 2025, exhibition view. Courtesy: Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco}