Because

Words have always been central to the practice of French artist Sophie Calle. In this project, Calle conceives of the internal thought processes behind her art-making as stories to be told. It is with these stories—alongside the external stories of the moments preceding a click of a camera shutter—that Calle opens Because. The volume chronicles her reasons behind capturing particular moments in time, but the corresponding photos themselves are revealed only later, hidden in the interstices of the Japanese binding. In this process, Calle reverses the relationship of natural primacy between an image and the words that accompany it, instead calling our attention to the influence that the latter may have on our perception of a photograph.

The new revised edition of this classic artist’s book contains 39 loose photographs inserted between the pages, alongside text and other imagery by Calle. A beautiful object in its own right, it features Japanese binding and an iridescent orange cloth cover.

Sophie Calle (born 1953) is an internationally renowned artist whose controversial works often fuse conceptual art and Oulipo-like constraints, investigatory methods and the plundering of autobiography. The Whitechapel Gallery in London organized a retrospective in 2009, and her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Hayward Gallery and Serpentine, London; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, among others. She lives and works in Paris.