Romance in Granada

Sophie Calle uses the camera to document but also narrativise her own life. Calle’s work can be read as an exercise in disclosure and an ongoing autobiographical study wherein the camera is treated as a confessional tool. In judiciously revealing the nuances of her emotional life, Calle gently complicates our understanding of photography’s claim to truth and veracity while also interrogating the limits of representation.

Romance in Granada is from Calle’s seminal series The Blind in which the artist asked subjects who were blind from birth to describe their idea of beauty. She then took photographs of the things and scenes they described, providing a visual analogue to their imagined images. Each work in the series features a portrait of the subject, a transcipt of their answer and Calle’s own interpretation of their idea of beauty. Yet Calle’s photographic interpretation can only ever be an imprecise translation. Her photographs constitute an attempt to locate an idea in concrete pictorial terms and inhabit the mind of another. These interpretations can only ever be speculative substitutes for the subject’s imagined scenes. The project, then, can be read as a poetic testimony to the the slipperiness of photography; to the indeterminacy of the image and the potency of its affect.