Sophie Calle: Blind

In her book Blind, the conceptual artist Sophie Calle revisits three of her earlier works in which she explored the idea of blindness. In her 1986 project The Blind, she asked people who had been born blind how they imagined beauty. In her 1991 project Blind Colour, she asked blind people about their imagination or perception and accompanied their statements with texts by contemporary theoreticians on the monochrome. The Last Image is a project that she made in 2010 in Istanbul and includes answers from people who had suddenly gone blind to the question about the last image they had seen.

By establishing a dialectical relation between the statements of various generations of blind people and the artist’s photos that support the statements, the artist offers the reader/viewer a reflection on the absence or loss of one sense and the comprehension of the visible and the invisible.

The book, which was published in 2011 by Actes Sud (Arles), is in English and includes Braille. It has yellow hard covers. It contains 103 paginated pages and 25 black-and-white and 60 colour photographs.