STALKER STRIPPER SLEEPER SPY

SOPHIE CALLE

JEAN BAUDRILLARD

For months I followed strangers on the street. For the pleasure of following them, not because they particularly interested me. I photographed them without their knowledge, took note of their movements, then nally lost sight of them and forgot them. - SC

"To shadow another is to give him, in fact, double life, a parallel existence. Any commonplace existence can be transgured (without one's knowledge), any exceptional existence can be made commonplace. It is this effect of doubling that makes the object surreal in its banality and weaves around it the strange (eventually dangerous?) web of seduction." - Jean Baudrillard

''Photography is itself an art of disappearance, which captures the other vanished in front of the lens, which preserves him vanished on lm, which, unlike a gaze, saves nothing of the other but his vanished presence - JB

I who followed him, I can assure you that no one was there. These are not souvenir snapshots of a presence, but rather shots of an absence, the absence of the followed, that of the follower, that of the reciprocal absence.

Take Care of Yourself 2007

Cindy Sherman

Tracy Emin