Episode 5 / The Art of Following
In The Art of Following, we walk with Sophie Calle through the alleys of Venice — and into the uneasy space between looking and intruding. Calle’s 1980 project Suite Vénitienne blurs the line between art and surveillance, desire and documentation. What begins as an impulsive pursuit becomes a meditation on seeing, walking, and being seen. Along the way, we meet echoes of Vito Acconci’s Following Piece, Paul Strand’s trick camera, and the long history of photographing without permission. Calle’s story reminds us that photography often starts with curiosity — and that curiosity can carry both tenderness and risk.
To follow is to surrender the map — to let someone else’s path draw your own. In Calle’s Venice, every step becomes a question about seeing and being seen.
When Sophie Calle followed a stranger to Venice in 1980, she transformed the act of pursuit into art. Suite Vénitienne was first published in 1983 and has since appeared in multiple editions, each rearranging photographs, maps, and diary pages as if truth itself refused to hold still. Calle’s approach was neither reportage nor pure fiction: it lived in the shifting space between them.
Her images alternate between precision and blur — some composed, others caught mid-stride. The contact sheets and maps she inserts invite us into her method, exposing the labor of attention behind every frame. Calle’s Venice becomes a labyrinth of mirrors: she follows Henri B., then finds herself photographed by him, the observer observed.
The episode places her within a longer lineage of “walking works”: from Paul Strand’s covert portraits to Vito Acconci’s Following Piece (1969), where the artist ceded control of his route to a stranger. Each asks how movement can become a form of drawing, a script of encounter.
See an image from Sophie Calle’s Suite vénitienne (1980).
Sources & Further Reading
Images & Works
Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne — View the 2015 edition at Siglio Press.
Vito Acconci, Following Piece, 1969 — View on Smarthistory.
Paul Strand, Blind Woman, New York, 1916 — View at The Met.
Texts & Ideas
Harriet Baker, “Sophie Calle: Suite Vénitienne,” Another, 2015 — Read.
Edward Levine, “In Pursuit of Acconci,” Artforum (April 1977) — Read.
JP McMahon, “Vito Acconci, Following Piece,” Smarthistory, 2015 — Read.
Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz, Bystander: A History of Street Photography, Laurence King, 2017.
Videos & Audio
Siglio Press, Sophie Calle’s Suite Vénitienne (2015) — Watch on YouTube.