In 1979, Sophie Calle asked twenty-nine friends, friends of friends, and strangers to sleep in her bed over the course of eight days. Each person was allotted an eight-hour shift. Some participants slept in pairs, but most were alone. Calle would take notes on her subjects’ nocturnal habits while photographing them, cataloguing their movements, mutterings, and moments of wakefulness. This documentary project, Les dormeurs (The Sleepers), comprises twenty-three framed texts and 176 black-and-white gelatin silver prints, all of which possess the quality of a curiously bloodless crime-scene picture. Calle’s images exude an unnerving gentleness, calling to mind the famous photo of Evelyn McHale, who took her own life by jumping off the observation deck of New York’s Empire State Building in 1947. McHale fell eighty-six stories to her death, landing on a car. The automobile is mangled but, miraculously, she is not: It appears as if she is merely napping on a mountain of crushed metal.
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Poet and translator Anne Carson—who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature this year—wrote about Les dormeurs in the January 2025 issue of Artforum as a response to “Overshare,” Calle’s first retrospective in the United States. Carson’s text, a kind of cathected essay, is not hypnagogic but hyperalert. Her writing delicately slices into the puzzling contours of Calle’s project, explaining to the reader what Les dormeurs is not:
this is not imitation sleep passing itself off as sleep
this is not a condition the locals have convinced you is sleep
this is not even a good wax cast of sleep
Of course, Carson forgoes telling us what the work is—oblique is the way of oracles and artists. She does, however, ask us to consider the various permutations of the word sleep in her piece, as they are tinted pink in the printed text. The shade is rosy but not necessarily salubrious; it’s the color of Pepto-Bismol, Serratia marcescens, a badly healed scar: pretty yet vaguely appalling.
—Alex Jovanovich
Read “Sophie Calle’s The Sleepers, 1979” in Artforum’s January 2025 issue.
And explore more essays on Sophie Calle from Artforum‘s archive. . .
April 2000: Character Study: Sophie Calle
September 2005: Review: Paula Cooper Gallery
April 2026: Review: UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art