Actes Sud Books

This expanded edition of Calle's 1994 classic features four new tales. First published in French in 1994, quickly acclaimed as a photobook classic and since republished and enhanced, 'True Stories' returns for the fifth time, gathering a series of short autobiographical texts and photos by acclaimed French artist Sophie Calle, this time with four new tales. Calle's projects have frequently drawn on episodes from her own life, but this book--part visual memoir, part meditation on the resonances of photographs and belongings--is as close as she has come to producing an autobiography, albeit one highly poetical and fragmentary, as is characteristic of her work. The tales--never longer than a page -- are by turns lighthearted, humorous, serious, dramatic or cruel. Each is accompanied by an image; each offers a fragment of life. The slim, portable volume is divided into sections: the first is composed of various reflections on objects such as a shoe, a postcard or "the breasts"; the second, "The Husband," of recollections of episodes from Calle's first marriage; and the third gathers a variety of autobiographical recollections. Calle herself is the author, narrator and protagonist of her stories and photography; her words are somber, chosen precisely and carefully. -- publisher's statement

As part of Grand Arles Express, with which the Lambert Collection has been associated since its inception in 2016, the famous Brazilian artist Vik Muniz returns to the papal city eight years after his major solo show to present Imaginaria, a series of works that have never been seen in Europe. Exhibited at the Lambert Collection, it comprises fifteen photographs featuring saints as depicted by great artists, from Simon Vouet's Saint Agnes to Philippe de Champaigne's Saint Augustine and Jose de Ribera's Saint Sebastian. In this new series, Muniz continues his exploration of the fascination with saints through the history of their representation in art and, consequently, the relationship between art works and the idea of the sacred.Composed of installations using everyday objects in incongruous situations (wire, sugar, ketchup, toys and cut-out magazines), Vik Muniz's photography reproduces images from collective memory and questions the notions of originality and copies. By audaciously re-appropriating icons of art history and the media world, the artist proposes a new relationship to images whose meaning and originality seems to have been exhausted by their reproduction and global diffusion.