True Stories

The photographer Sophie Calle claims that her husband was one year late to their first date. She also claims that she responded to a letter from a man in California going through a break-up by mailing him her bed. For all we know, she may have.

What makes a person spin tall tales? Or to paint over their reality — like Boris Mikhailov did in his 1970s series Yesterday’s Sandwich? Or, like Cristina de Middel to wield whiteout like a cudgel? Her redacted version of Mao’s Little Red Book blots out the chairman’s words until there is nothing left but the truth.

Here are eight books by photographers practiced in the art of embellishment. 

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Sophie Calle. True Stories

Sophie Calle has a reputation for testing the boundaries of privacy and consent. She once disguised herself as a hotel maid so that she could rummage through people’s suitcases. Another time, she asked 107 experts (like lawyers and doctors) to interpret her ex-boyfriend’s break-up letter. InTrue Stories, which is mostly autobiographical, Calle predictably takes us for a ride that feels too strange to be true. But the real mystery — where truth, imagination, and fiction intertwine — happens when her writing meets her photos.

Calle organizes her book into written vignettes, each one punctuated by a photograph. Side by side, we realize just how much pictures twist the meanings of words. The caption, whether in a photobook, a pasta advertisement, or a newspaper clipping, give us an inkling of what those images might mean. 

Here’s one from her book.

Why Calle places it next to a passage called “Silent Heart Attack” is up to you. 

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Keisha Scarville. Passports

I contain multitudes, goes the old adage.

Passport pictures have a way of flattening those multitudes. They permit no trace of individuality – no uniforms, glasses, hats, or smiles. With their neutral backdrops and even lighting, they flatten space too. There are no shadows, no depth, no soft edges.

Keisha Scarville’s point of departure in her new artist’s book with MACK is a passport photo her father took when he was 16 years old. That’s the age he immigrated to NYC from Guyana, not knowing what lay ahead. Scarville manipulates this original photograph to visualize who this man was, and who he could have been. There are some 300 of her photomontages in the book. In one instance, she imagines him as a superhero and paints a Batman mask over his face. She layers cutouts of baseball players, birds, and flowers on others. 

Scarville’s passport pictures of her father are also wonderfully tactile. Collaged with beads, paint, and glitter, the photographs resist flat sterility, and instead draw from the richly textured substance of Scarville’s memory.

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Boris Mikhailov. From Blaue Horse 'Til Now Days

From Blaue Horse ‘Till Now Days is Boris Mikhailov’s most recent retrospective with Mörel Books. The title draws inspiration from a Soviet Ukrainian student group called the Blue Horse that went on trial in the 1960s for their “inappropriate” way of life. Decades later, Mikhailov gained access to court papers and the group’s incriminating material. Far from malicious, the file included snapshots of friends and lovers “marked with judicial notes that simply said, ‘Life, youth, and joy.’”

The Soviet system placed all sorts of constraints on sex and how it could be represented in public life. (“In the Soviet Union, we don’t have sex!” became a catch phrase, after a Leningrad hotel administrator uttered the words to a Boston woman on a glasnost-era US-Soviet television broadcast.) Mikhailov’s expressions of sensuality pushed these constraints to their limits, revealing an interiority not beholden to proscribed meaning. 

Mikhailov tested these boundaries with projects likeYesterday’s Sandwich, in which the artist pressed negatives together in the enlarger to create bizarre superimpositions. A few examples: the specter of a nude woman’s body floating over an industrial construction site, crucifixion figurines against bright yellow fried eggs, a massive ear among a city street’s hustle and bustle. Surreal and psychological, these collages present visions of reality that resist a rigid binary of truth and falsehood, and right and wrong. 

In his book, Mikhailov reflects “a photographer’s task is always to find the subtle and vague border between the permitted and the prohibited. This border is constantly changing like life itself.”

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Cristina de Middel. Quitonasto Form Chanmair Mao Tungest

Cristina de Middel’s Quitonasto Form Chanmair Mao Tungest is a near facsimile of Mao’s Little Red Book. There are a few important differences between de Middel's and the original, however. Her version is heavily redacted. She also inserted snapshots of everyday life in China throughout. 

Censorship is a tool that fundamentally shapes a sense of truth. These distortions have their own logic, with ideological messaging that is sometimes so incredulous as to become absurd. De Middel turns these distortions into a game. The book’s title, Quitonasto Form Chanmair Mao Tungest, for example, is an anagram of Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung. Meanwhile, within the book, nearly every line of Mao’s original speeches has been crossed out. The remaining words create unexpected aphorisms. While The Little Red Book affirms an invincible collective, de Middel’s Quitonasto affirms the vulnerable, the uncertain, and the beautifully banal that life has to offer.

Here’s one:

If there is to be revolution, there must be a party

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Emily Graham. The Blindest Man

In 1993, a French man writing under the pseudonym of Max Valentin published a book with clues to a hidden treasure: a diamond studded statuette of a golden and silver owl originally worth some 150,000 euros. Here’s his first clue if you want to give it a shot:

UT QUEANT LAXIS

At 2424-42-424-44-224-24-42-24, take the orthogonal.

To find the Spiral with four centers,

560.606 measures, it's far.

But by the Mega, it's a million times less.

The photographer Emily Graham followed various treasure hunters’ attempts to find the hidden owl and made photographs along the way. The resulting photobook, The Blindest Man, becomes its own riddle. Each clue listed on the covers and endpapers corresponds to one of her photographs. Look closely and there are hidden detours that Graham throws in.

In writing this text, something extraordinary happened. I learned that in 2024, two years after Graham published her book, a treasure hunter finally found the golden owl.

The plot thickens however!

Michel Becker, the artist who illustrated Max Valentin’s original book of clues, went to check on the treasure in 2021 with a bailiff. Becker claims that he and Valentin buried a bronze countermark in 1993 that would need to be submitted alongside the solved riddles to receive the prize. But when he dug up the spot, instead of the bronze decoy, he found a corroded ferrous bird. Becker planted a new bronze decoy so that the treasure hunt could continue. 

The question remains: who planted the rusty iron bird — the decoy of the decoy?

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Hervé Guibert. Suzanne and Louise

The late artist and enfant terrible Hervé Guibert told the truth to a fault. He was ambidextrous as a photographer and a writer. In both mediums he exposed his own vulernabilites, and those of his loved ones. His 1990 novel To The Friend Who Did Not Save My Life, for example, told of his friendship with Michel Foucault in intimate detail as they both suffered fatally from AIDS. 

Guibert also had a luminous way of combining memoir with fragments of fantasies and dreams. Suzanne and Louise, Guibert's only “photo-novel,” is about his two eccentric 90-year-old great aunts. With death on their doorstep, the three of them rehearse their grief. The many vignettes throughout read as mini-performances and at one point, Suzanne even simulates her own passing. Suzanne, Louise, and Hervé loved deeply through their last days. In 1991, Suzanne and Hervé both passed away and Louise joined them a few years later.

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Bharat Sikka. Elephant in the Room

This summer, Pope Leo issued an encyclical about the role of AI, asking how we might safeguard humanity from abuses by powerful tech companies and governmental actors. More recently, an Anthropic employee put a 10 percent chance that AI will wipe out all of humanity within a decade.

With apocalypse in the air, it's hard to keep focus on what AI means for a medium as seemingly innocuous as art photography.

The question still matters of course. Photographs, as we know, are never objective. They inevitably reflect the photographer's perception. Sometimes, it's at the expense of the subject; As a colonial tool, photographs have historically misrepresented communities and populations to justify violence against them. What happens when AI constructs a photograph by relying on a vast archive of documentary photos made from perspectives entrenched with bias?

Bharat Sikka’s Elephant in the Room draws AI into his broader interests about how complex power dynamics shape India’s cultural landscape. Based in Delhi, Sikka has previously focused on topics like Kashmir’s landscape and history, the impact of globalization, and Indian masculinity. Sikka’s new book observes how AI attempts to visually represent modern-day India. Much of the photographs in Elephant in the Room begin with Sikka’s own work (his archive was consumed by fire a few years ago). While we’ll never know what kinds of inputs Sikka put into these pictures, it’s clear that the cultural misreading is part of the book’s conceit.

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Tyler Mitchell. Wish This Was Real

In Wish This Was Real, Tyler Mitchell envisions what a Black paradise might look like. One quality stands out: paradise is a place to rest.

Recalling Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Mitchell’s 2021 tableaux Riverside Scene depicts Black families reposing in their Sunday best in a field of bright yellow wildflowers. One reason that Seurat's iconic pointilist painting is worth paying attention to is that it depicts a cross section of the working and middle classes in Parisian modern life in the late 19th century. Notably, however, none of the subjects are Black. In his interview with Rashid Johnson for the book, Mitchell asks, “what if history had been different?” In series like I Can Make You Feel Good, Ghost Images, and This Side of Paradise, Mitchell rewrites a past in which Black people have been kept out of spaces of leisure. 

Mitchell raises these questions through his métier, which is fashion photography.  He tells Johnson, fashion is a “space where I can inject my ideas, questions, thoughts, and feelings into a framework, an assignment really.” Artifice — the kind that’s made with lights, backdrops, and staging —  has a special role in fashion. It drills into our dreams and desires. Perhaps because fashion is often so unreal, it's all the more irresistible. Tyler Mitchell knows how to play with that quality to create a picture of paradise.