Reframing Sophie Calle: An Interview with Julia Born

By Ben Schwartz

Walker Publishing Filed to Design

Spread from the exhibition catalog Sophie Calle: Overshare, 2024. Photo by Kameron Herndon. Courtesy Walker Art Center.

Sophie Calle: Overshare, the latest exhibition of Sophie Calle’s work at the Walker Art Center, offers a sweeping survey of the French artist’s career spanning the last 50 years. Calle’s diaristic and voyeuristic works feel both intrusive and vulnerable—a particularly resonant combination in today’s social media–driven culture, as underscored by the exhibition’s fittingly modern title.

The catalogue for the show, designed by Swiss graphic designer Julia Born, is striking in its simplicity. However, spending more time with the publication reveals an intricate typographic and graphic system that allows the reader to navigate Calle’s fragmented work in an almost intuitive manner.

Thinking more about Born’s work, I keep returning to this idea of a complex-simplicity (or maybe a simple-complexity). Her ideas on their surface can feel almost primary, but when put into practice they have an ability to abstract, or connect, or open up material in spontaneous and unexpected ways. Overshare does just that with a quiet yet masterful confidence. In the following conversation, I chat with Born about the process of designing Overshare, disassembling cooked recipes, and creating an intricate network of meta-frames.

Ben Schwartz

Talk to me about your relationship to Sophie Calle’s work prior to working on the Overshare catalogue.

Julia Born

I was first introduced to Sophie Calle when my father, who always used to give us a book for Christmas, gave me Double Game, which she collaborated on with the author Paul Auster. She then became a very important figure for me during my studies at the Rietveld [Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie]. I remember even making a specific project in school that was a direct reaction to her work.

It was the piece Shadow that influenced me the most. She had her mother hire a private detective to follow her around and document her actions and whereabouts. I was so impressed with the inversion that was happening, how she was the object of the work and at the same time controlling the entire process. I also appreciated how all the documentation from this piece was not from her, but from the detective. I love the way that she uses photography as a tool for evidence and documentation, rather than in the more traditional sense of the medium.

BS

From what I know about your work, especially with collaborators like Alexandra Bachzetsis or Uta Eisenreich, there is often a strong dialogue between yourself and the artist over a long period of time. What was your working relationship like with Calle?

JB

When possible, I always like to meet the artists I’m working with. I had a great opportunity to meet Calle after seeing her show, À toi de faire, ma mignonne [It’s up to you, my darling] at the Musée Picasso in Paris. In the meeting she made it very clear that this should be a more straightforward exhibition catalogue rather than an artist book, and therefore wasn’t so interested in engaging in a dialogue. Because of this, it gave myself and the team at the Walker quite a bit of freedom to make the decisions we felt were best.

Many of her past books are artist books, which she works on with a number of different designers and a few select publishers. At the beginning of the project, I sought out her books in several libraries around Zurich, and the Walker sent me what it had of her collection. It made for an interesting way of studying her work because, in a way, you’re already seeing “cooked recipes.” When it came to making this catalogue, I had to try and think about the material unprocessed. I also had to consider that these artist books were showing a work in its entirety. Since Overshare was a retrospective survey, we could only show excerpts of the work in order to cover several decades.

BS

Were you reacting toward or against Calle’s history of books in any particular way?

JB

I took very seriously what Calle had said about this project—that this was an exhibition catalogue, not an artist book. And of course I knew it would be a challenge because her work exists so well in books, but this needed to translate an exhibition of her work —which was already a translation of her work from books—back into a book, but as an exhibition. This idea of translation and layers became central throughout the whole project, even down to the structure of the book, which takes the show’s floor plan as a way to organize the chapters.

BS

I really love the title of the show, Overshare: the way it recontextualizes Calle’s work in a hyper-contemporary landscape. Did the title resonate or spark anything for you?

JB

Absolutely, the title is fantastic and I could really relate to it. In Henriette Huldisch’s text for the catalogue, she mentions how Calle is highly intentional in regards to what she chooses to divulge, and that any notion of her work being “too much” or having gone “too far” is underscored with a certain sense of misogyny. She says, “Calle shows us better than anyone that perhaps oversharers know what they’re doing.” As you alluded to, there is also this relevant connection to social media, with the whole idea of oversharing and questions about privacy, intimacy, and boundaries.

BS

The first thing I noticed is how simple and straightforward the book object is. When I think of your past projects, I associate them closely with iconic material gestures—cutting the fore edge, double die-cuts, gatefolds that wrap signatures, etc. But this book really pares things down. What was the reason for such a materially reduced book?

JB

As I mentioned, I went deep into Calle’s past books. I tried to get an understanding of the status quo of her work, to understand what she was already doing and how I might depart from that. In all the books there is a lot happening: transparencies, ribbons, glued-in photographs. They are very elaborate, oftentimes smaller in scale, and somewhat nostalgic objects. They tend to use the medium of the book to emphasize this notion of “souvenir” or “novel” to draw attention to the literary—or paraliterary— qualities of her work. I wanted to do things differently with this one, almost the opposite with a larger format, which refers more to a magazine, soft cover, and one paper stock throughout.

BS

Outside of Calle’s own work, what influences did you bring into the process?

JB

In conversations with Mark Owens, the work of W. G. Sebald came up, who coincidentally I became familiar with in the 2000s, around the same time I was interested in Calle. I was fascinated with literature that took images very seriously and would often embed them in the text. In Sebald’s case, image works as evidence, but at the same time calls into question the very definition of evidence within the context of fiction. It’s this entanglement of fact and fiction that I find so fascinating within Calle’s work.

Another reference that was really important to me was Bertolt Brecht’s War Primer, which I thought of after looking at some of Calle’s own diaries and photo albums. In War Primer, Brecht combines a series of poems with newspaper clippings of World War II, placing them in such a way that they can almost be read as captions. The text-image pairings make visible the disturbing relationship between the horrors of war and mass media. In both Calle’s diaries and in War Primer, images and text have a physicality to them. I also began thinking about all the different types of texts in Calle’s work and thought of needing to make certain distinctions between them.

BS

This sort of thinking makes sense given your history of collaborating with artists who work with language. I’m thinking here of people like Shannon Ebner, Moyra Davey, even Alexandra Bachzetsis in some ways, not to mention your own personal linguistic projects. I’m not so sure how concerned Calle is with language itself, but language is absolutely a material in the work. Could you talk about the treatment of language in the book?

JB

There are a lot of typographic layers, and I knew I needed to design a navigation system to allow the reader to understand them. I was able to do this both through font choices and the way the texts are laid out on the page.

First, there is the editorial layer for more pragmatic things, like titles or captions, and this is done in Helvetica. Then, with each work or series, Calle writes her own captions that begin the narration of the work—interestingly enough, she will often rewrite these, edit them, amend them, each time they are shown. These are done in Times and are placed directly on the background with only a thin black frame. I use Times New Roman for either work descriptions or when text is used in a work, and I use a cut of Times Mono —Pantasia by Wei Huang— for the voice of Calle in various reports or documents. These are always on a white background to suggest a document or sheet of paper. To further complicate things, there are also notes or documents which Calle does not write—like in the case of Shadow, where the detective is writing them—and these are set in another typewriter font, LL Electa, and are on a gray background.

My approach was to think of text in different states: speech, document, evidence, reports, captions, contracts, mail, voiceover, etc. The text moves between two and three dimensions, sometimes flat and sometimes physical, and I wanted to create a system that communicated these layers.

One idea I was sad to let go of was to use Calle’s actual handwriting. In her exhibitions, after they are installed, she will go around with a pencil and write additional content on the walls. So I wanted her to do annotations in her own handwriting throughout the book, which would have been this whole other layer of text, but unfortunately the idea didn’t make it through.

BS

What about the use of Optima?

JB

In one of her films, No Sex Last Night (1992), she uses Optima for subtitles. The one I am using is actually a version of Optima, produced for the IBM Selectric typewriter and called Title. I approached the designer Christopher West, who was working on a version of this, and was able to have it ready in time for use in the book. His font is called Addenda, named for the Fluxus etc. / Addenda II exhibition catalogue from 1983. In Overshare I used it for the essays and to give the book a certain identity.

BS

Alongside the typographic system is this system of frames. Can you talk a bit about that?

JB

This sounds obvious, but for me the main question with a project like this is: How does the work best translate into a book? And the answer is never the same; it’s always, in every case, in every work, an entirely new question. And trying to answer the question in this case also came the additional question of how to frame, and reframe, Calle’s work in a way that felt much different than anything she has done before. As I mentioned, the challenge here was: You are looking at an image, but that image may have initially been placed in a book, which was then placed in an exhibition, which was then placed back into this book. There are all these layers of context which I wanted to try and make visible.

So this box-border framing system, or “passe-partout,” became the main design concept that is used throughout. Passe-partout is the French term for what you would call the framing matte in English. It’s often used with framing photography and is a way to hide the edges of the image and protect it from the glass.

At times, the frames and their placement on the page really become a graphic interpretation of how she exhibits the work. One instance of this is with Autobiographies (1992). When this series is shown, there is often a framed vertical image placed on the floor and a framed text panel above it. Together, they appear as a sort of “body” in a very illustrative way. The book mimics this idiosyncratic placement. A similar thing is done with the work On the Hunt (2024). I really enjoy these moments where I’m relying on something else to make certain design decisions that I would never have made on my own.

BS

What’s amazing is the way you develop this really robust graphic and typographic vocabulary that all works together so seamlessly, yet the book still retains this loose, spontaneous quality. What I enjoy most about this book is the lack of one linear read. Your eyes jump around the page and artworks come together in fragments. I think about other books of yours—specifically Amateur—which allows for a different read each time you open the book. As a designer, I think there is always a desire for clarity, but you often seem to welcome a more ambiguous read.

JB

With this book I was interested in this idea of “assembling.” Her work speaks to me because she often exhibits fragments of a narrative or story, and as the viewer you’re called to piece it together.

BS

I feel covers are always the most daunting part of any project. Talk to me about how the cover of Overshare came together.

JB

The cover idea came together quite quickly at the beginning. It reveals itself if you open the book and look at the front-spine-back together. The image has fallen out of the frame.

I do really like the photograph, the man covering himself with his hand, saying, “That’s enough.” There was something nice about this boundary being expressed. This is what the idea of Overshare is all about: it’s a judgmental title, and I wanted that judgment expressed on the cover.

BS

In the text for the artwork Cash Machine, Calle says, “The images were beautiful but I thought if I just used them as found documents, without adding anything of my own, I would be betraying my own style.” Do you think about your own style when making books? Are there certain stylistic tendencies of yours that you see in this book?

JB

My aim is to not have any visible aesthetic signature, although I know people who may say that they recognize a book I made. Sometimes I think it has less to do with aesthetics and more to do with how I might approach things and the sorts of methods I employ. But there is no set recipe, and each project brings about different requirements and procedures. Sometimes I’m looking for a material approach, other times it’s working more with text/image relationships. It all really depends.

BS

Some of what I might consider your “style” is the way you are able to edit things down to a single element or idea. In an interview Linda van Deursen said, “Take Julia Born’s books, for example, they’re all really based on this kind of heavy editing in the beginning. To take even a single element of the work maybe—the essence of that work—and then make the book. They’re always ‘single-subject books.’” But with these more institutional books, I’d imagine you have less of a hand in this process. Are there ways you still utilize your editing process?

JB

No, I don’t really think that comes into play here. For me, with each project comes a different role or mode. When I’m working directly with an artist, I may take on the role as more of an editor. In other projects, where a curator is involved and acts as the mediator of the artist, we take on the roles of co-editors, trying to convey what’s essential to the artist’s work as well as to the exhibition. And in this case, it’s interesting to take a step back from the artist and to think and work more with the curatorial vision, finding ways that the exhibition and the catalogue can co-relate.

BS

To end, maybe you could overshare something from this project?

JB

One moment that stuck out to me from the process—and Henriette actually talks about it in her essay—was when we were visiting Calle in Paris. She had just opened her solo exhibition at the Musée Picasso and had essentially moved her entire life into one floor of the museum. Outside her living quarters was a sign that said the artist might be behind this door. While we were there, someone knocked, and I just remember Calle was slightly irritated that someone would intrude into her life in such a bold way despite the audience being invited to do so. It was quite an interesting contradiction in this larger context of oversharing. It reminds me now that, in the beginning of this project, I made a list of these sorts of contradictory ideas that her work brought up for me: visibility/invisibility, closeness/distance, concealment/disclosure, remembering/forgetting, and presence/absence. I appreciated thinking about these opposites in the book-making process. It’s a challenge to somehow cover this range of ideas, but contradictions tend to open up a very unique space.▪︎

Experience Sophie Calle: Overshare for yourself at the Walker from Oct 26, 2024–Jan 26, 2025.

Interested in getting your hands on a copy of the Sophie Calle: Overshare catalog? Pick yours up at the Walker's Museum Shop 24/7 at shop.walkerart.org