Because...

This new edition is expanded with 6 new stories as well as 7 new photographs. In July 1985, Sophie Calle was invited, as well as Hervé Guibert, Jacques Monory and Denis Roche, to project and comment on my photographs at the Theater antique of Arles. Denis Roche closed the program with a wonderful idea. In the darkness, he recounted the moments leading up to his decision to take a picture, then he would show the image for the time of a click." It is by this story, Click, the click of the camera as well as that of the brain in which the idea arises, that Sophie Calle opens Because. Like Denis Roche, she undertakes to tell the reason, or at least one reason, which pushed her to press the shutter button. Thus reversing the natural primacy ratio between an image and the words that accompany it, Sophie Calle raises a reflection on the influence that these can have last on our reception of photography. This does not reveal itself moreover, a posteriori, hidden in the interstice of the binding at the Japanese. Far from being reduced to simple legends, these words – a thought, a story or a question – do not adhere in a manner consistent with the image which accompanies them: on the contrary, they mark a strong contrast with it, the more often with malice, sometimes with nostalgia. Sophie Calle has thus produced a work with an original design, which is part of in the continuity of his impertinent and poetic work.