Product DescriptionA poignant visual record of the obsessive nature of failed love by a leading French contemporary artist.
Over the last two decades, Sophie Calle has made it her business to follow, peek into, and illuminate the lives of people she barely knows. In Exquisite Pain, Calle turns her attention to a life-changing experience from her own past.
This book is a visual record of the time in 1985 when a lover failed to meet Calle as promised in a hotel in New Delhi. Calle was devastated. As always, she kept everything from that journey—photographs, ticket stubs, visas, and letters—each image rubber-stamped to mark the countdown to the fateful day of her heartbreak.
On her return to Paris, she asked a group of friends to answer the question, 'When did you most suffer?' Their stories of pain, each of them accompanied by a photograph, interplay with Calle's own story and daily reflections—'It is now seventy-five days since the man I love left me'—creating a testament to the heartache of romantic rejection. 130 illustrations, 71 in color.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - Exquisite Pain
I saw her photo installation of Exquisite Pain in NYC summer 2005, and this is the whole show beautifully captured in book format. Sophie Calle is by far my favorite artist. She triggers your emotions pulling you into her own story of a lost love and others shared moments of exquisite pain. Perfect for your art book collection.
Rating: - Prepare to peer into the meaningless void that is your existence and revel in misery.
This is not a book for sunny afternoons in park gardens; the backdrop for this book should be bleak unforgiving concrete cityscapes, silhouetted against dark and brooding winter skies. At least that's what it was like when read it (I live in Birmingham, you see bleak is what it does best).
If you've ever been in love and lost that person; though careless words, deeds or just through circumstances outside of your control. Then you'll know all about that feeling of emptiness, like a hole ... Read More
