Actes Sud Livres

First published in French in 1994, quickly acclaimed as a photobook classic, and now expanded and reissued in this first English-language edition from Actes Sud, "True Stories" gathers a series of short autobiographical texts and photos by Sophie Calle. 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. The first section is composed of various reflections on objects such as a shoe, a postcard, a bathrobe and a bed, or musings on the artist's body, such as "The Love Letter": "For years a love letter languished on my desk. I had never received a love letter, so I paid a public scribe to write one. Eight days later, I received seven beautiful pages of pure poetry penned in ink. It had cost me one hundred francs and the man said: '...as for myself, without moving from my chair I was everywhere with you.'" The second section of the book, "The Husband," is comprised of ten recollections of episodes from Calle's first marriage, by turns funny ("He was an unreliable man. For our first date he showed up one year late."), erotic and sad. A third section gathers various autobiographical tales, and the book closes with three interlinked stories titled "Monique." This new edition includes five new photo-text presentations and is the first English translation. Sophie Calle (born 1953) is a French writer, photographer, installation artist and conceptual artist. Among her many publications are "The Address Book," "Blind," "Take Care of Yourself" and "Double Game."

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.