Artist, Sophie Calle: I started to be an artist without really deciding it.
Narrator: That's the French artist Sophie Calle speaking at a lecture in 2004. She made this series, The Sleepers, after spending seven years traveling the world.
Sophie Calle: And when I came back to France, I was absolutely lost. I had no more friends. I had no job. And since I didn't know what to do, I decided to follow people in the streets of Paris initially, and just go wherever the person went. So I start to take photos of those people and take notes of what they were doing. But it was not an artistic work. It was just a way to meet again with my city and do something.
After a while, I decided to really become more professional, so I started to make a little lab in my house to print those photos with a girlfriend. And one night, she came back. She had been working all night. She mentioned she was tired and she would like to sleep in my bed. It gave me the idea to have my bed occupied during one week.
So I invited people I didn't know to come and sleep by eight-hour shift. I asked people in the street to come and sleep in my bed. I took a photograph every hour and made a kind of questionnaire because I was afraid of those unknown people in my bed, and I was afraid of the silence.
Each person would come take the place of the other one before them in the bed, and they would stay eight hours. There was a tape recorder in the room, taping every encounter and every meeting.
One of the girls I invited to sleep in my bed—we met in the market next door—was a wife of an art critic. So she came back home, she told her husband, and he asked me to show those photos. And that's how I became an artist.