The Easel

15th February 2022

Room service: Review of The Hotel by Sophie Calle

Michael Quinn | Star-Revue | 14th February 2022

In 1981, Calle briefly worked in Venice cleaning hotel rooms, covertly recording what she found. The resultant text / photographic document is regarded as a seminal artwork. Ethical issues obvious then are now even more so. Is this voyeurism or merely “frisky predation” which yields portraits of people based on their mess? Is her “deliberate aesthetic detachedness” a defence? Whatever the ethical wriggle room of 1981, it is surely a whole lot less now. A commentary by Calle is here.

8th February 2022

Jeff Wall with Barry Schwabsky

Barry Schwabsky | The Brooklyn Rail | 1st February 2022

Amidst a flurry of shows, Wall discusses his acclaimed “staged” photography. From the outset, he was attracted to artifice, something photography had long rejected. And he sensed that making his images large was a “central” step because big pictures are “a more physical way of capturing your imagination”. With these elements, Wall happily calls his approach “cinematography”. Just don’t conflate that with the cinema – “They’re really not the same thing.”

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