Editions de l’Etoile, 1983. Squarish 8vo in wraps with dustjacket. 93 (1) pages. Calles photographs with her text in French. Minor foxing to foreedge and minor discoloring to the edges of the white cover -a problem that comes with this series of publications but this copy is above average and overall a well preserved and very good copy

First edition of “Suite Vénitienne”, the important first book by Sophie Calle in which she follows a stranger to Venice and documents his doings in photographs and texts. A diary: The artist follows a man, known here as only Henri B., from Paris to Venice, where she spends 12 days trailing him.The two don’t know each other, or only slightly; as she explains, “At the end of January 1980, on the streets of Paris, I followed a man whom I lost sight of a few minutes later in the crowd. That very evening, quite by chance, he was introduced to me at an opening. During the course of our conversation, he told me he was planning an imminent trip to Venice. I decided to follow him.” . Full title is “Ecrit sur l’image: Sophie Calle: Suite venitienne – Jean Baudrillard – Please follow me” and was part of a series of books that also included a photobook by Depardon and an essay by Michel Serres. “Already with this her first artistbook or “photobook” she has her own unique voice, a clear style that makes her stand out from most other “photobook” artists. One might be tempted to say that she creates her own genre of artists book in the playful way she employs words to photos in an selfconscious autobiographical setting – that is also a version of feminism, a turning over , reversing, the stalker perspective from men to women, but in a way that leaves it open to the reader (the real viewer of the story – the stalker) what to conclude of the final work. The reader is clearly also a voyeur, but is the reader a complicit? Or a moral instance or is the reader also being read, or even womanized, by Calle ?