Suite Vénitienne (1980) is an early work by French artist Sophie Calle in which she secretly stalked a man from Paris to Venice, documenting his movements with photographs and notes. For nearly two weeks she trailed him through the city’s streets and canals without his knowledge, recording not only where he went but also her own shifting emotions of anticipation, intrusion, and vulnerability.
The project unfolds as both detective case file and personal diary. Calle’s photographs are often distant, blurred, or partial, capturing her subject from the edges of crowds or across squares, while her writing narrates the pursuit with candor and unease. The result is a narrative where surveillance masquerades as intimacy and obsession blurs into performance.
By converting a clandestine act into art, Calle unsettles the boundaries of subject and object, private and public, truth and fiction. The work remains provocative because it refuses to resolve the ethical discomfort at its core: to look at another without consent is to reveal as much about the watcher as the watched.
Images from AnOther Mag, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, and Siglio Press.
