Sophie Calle

At Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, the French photographer and conceptual artist Sophie Calle presents an assortment of projects deferred or abandoned over the course of her 40-year career.

- Nicholas Gamso

These ‘ideas which have gone nowhere’, as they are described in an introductory wall text, are at last ‘pronounced finished’, though one can never be sure. Calle’s brand of ephemeral art intervention – often produced in secret, without participants’ consent – would seem to evade any definite endpoint. Save one: death.

Her manner of organizing and, of late, terminating her artworks is remarkably unsentimental. In the exhibition's first room, Calle pairs several fragments and false starts with short text panels explaining why she chose to move on. There's a photographic study of identical twin brothers, Emmanuel and Maximilien Berque (Twins [Max died], 2025), living by the beach, still dressing alike into their 60s. Calle, who visited them yearly, declined to continue the work after Max's death: ‘game over’, she writes. In another project,