About the work
The Address Book is a 1983 work by the French conceptual artist Sophie Calle that combines text and photography and first appeared as a serial in the Paris daily Libération. Because the owner of the address book objected, the material was only republished after his death: in English by Siglio Press in 2012 and in German by Suhrkamp in 2019, translated by Sabine Erbrich. As a stage piece ("a labyrinth after Sophie Calle"), the material premiered on 25 September 2026 in the MalerSaal of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, directed by Ruben Müller.
Plot
Calle finds a stranger's address book on a Paris street, photocopies its pages and has it returned anonymously to its owner, a man named Pierre D. She then contacts the people listed in it and has his relatives, friends, acquaintances and former lovers tell her about him, without ever meeting him herself. From these conversations and her photographs emerges the portrait of an unknown man, assembled entirely from the way others see him.
Cultural significance
The project is among Calle's most controversial works: the owner, the filmmaker Pierre Baudry, felt his privacy had been violated, threatened legal action and demanded that the newspaper print a nude photograph of the artist in retaliation. Reviews of the German edition likewise wavered between admiration for its literary and photographic quality and the charge of intrusive curiosity; the work continues to raise questions about privacy, the misuse of personal data and the limits of art.