Show me who you follow and I’ll show you who you are: An analysis of the labyrinth of longing at the heart of Sophie Calle’s Suite Vénitienne

“Show me your home, and I’ll tell you who you are,” Sophie Calle writes in Suite Vénitienne (1988, p.34). She notices the phrase above the door to an antique shop while waiting for the man she is following. The phrase has a long history, appearing in different permutations in texts by Miguel de Cervantes, André Breton and others, and hinting at a duality between our identities and the company we keep. Its inclusion in Suite Vénitienne could not be more appropriate; this is a text of doubles and duplicity, presence and absence, disappearances and appearances.

The work chronicles Calle’s project in February 1980, in which she covertly followed a man she did not know, and whom she introduces only as Henri B., on his trip to Venice. The result is a set of surveillance-style photographs presented alongside written diaristic entries detailing a mixture of recorded information (dates, places, times, movements, observations) and her personal thoughts, hopes, fears and feelings about the activity she has undertaken. Calle’s project can be considered to have three dimensions: a game; a pursuit, understood as an act of following; and an inquiry into human behaviour, framed as an “experimental experience” (Gratton, 2003, p.158).

It is in Calle’s personal commentary that we find Suite Vénitienne ’s most revealing material, created not from the conceptual undertaking of documenting Henri B.’s movements, but from Calle’s own emotional response to the chase. These form an affective portrait of her unconventional relationship with Henri B., intimate but distant, and fraught with fragility and risk. Set against the Venetian theatre of winding streets, claustrophobic spaces and carnival, the affective qualities of Calle’s text find themselves imprinted on the city itself. Venice is transformed into a labyrinth of longing, a maze in which space and interpersonal relationships collide and fragment.

While Calle’s work does not engage in overt political criticism, it acquires political meaning from its examination of urban spaces and its playing with the dynamics of identity and desire.

In this essay, I will examine how Calle plays with identity and truth in Suite Vénitienne , and in doing so, exposes the normally intangible aspects of how space and relationships make us feel. Building on the writings of Baudrillard, Debord and Elkin, I will connect the text to wider frameworks centred around the language of seduction, psychogeography and the feminine figure of the flâneuse. In doing so, I uncover the implications of the act of following on narrative voice and examine how this material offers new ways of writing about the spaces we inhabit and the strangers we share them with.

Throughout Suite Vénitienne , Calle blurs the lines between reality and fiction. This creates suspicion around its documentary premise. Some critics have argued that her “act of following becomes a performance” (Russo, 2015) and therefore regard the work as a form of life art or autofiction, while others claim she is an “unreliable narrator” (Morgan, 2009, p.47) and advocate for a more sceptical reading of the piece. When she is unable to locate Henri B. upon her arrival in Venice, Calle situates the text around his physical absence, detailing her systematic search for him alongside poignant reflections on the shared universality of the local weather: “I know so little about him, except that he had rain and fog for the first days, that he now has sun” (Calle, 1988, p.10).

Later she increasingly resorts to fantasy and projection as a means of recreating him during times where she is not following him. She knows he likes cemeteries and so visits the Jewish cemetery in the hope of finding him there, only to be disappointed: “This is where he should have been. I have high expectations of him” (Calle, 1988, p.30). She soon begins to transpose her own thoughts onto his. Whilst waiting for him outside the antiques shop, Calle becomes frustrated and believes he is taunting her: “You can wait for me, I won’t come” (Calle, 1988, p.38). She allows her imagination to fill the gap created by Henri B.’s absence and this becomes part of the performative fabric of her work. Reading Suite Vénitienne as truth is certainly problematic; though it is not acknowledged in the text, the photos are staged reproductions of Calle’s actual surveillance photographs, created using actors prior to publication (Gratton, 2003, p.164).

A reading of Suite Vénitienne generates an uncanny resonance in the reader; the text is brimming with affective sentiments and a vicarious quality that grows as we follow Calle’s story. The reader overcomes the initial discomfort with her language of surveillance and stalking and becomes a “co-conspirator” (Colberg, 2017) in the text. As we read, we feel invested in Calle’s pursuit of Henri B. and through gradual revelations the text mimics the feeling of “getting to know” (Hand, 2005, p.477) someone for the first time. The pathways they travel take on the feeling of our own experiences with strangers and friends, and we see our own interpersonal experiences reflected back at us. Yet this person whom we discover in Suite Vénitienne is not Henri B. Instead, we find that we are learning more about Sophie Calle.

Calle plays with her own identity throughout the text; she writes ambivalent passages that stretch plausibility and generate accusations of self-mythologization (Rowlands, 2021). Throughout the text we never see a clear photo of her; she is always in disguise and reveals little of her own past. Her presence in the text feels filtered in a way that allows her to show a carefully curated identity. Lake (2024) argues that Calle successfully manages to make the personal universal and therefore avoids the traps through which the text is seen as a self-reflection of the author’s life. Therefore, her identity functions as a cipher intended to “dramatize the instability of the self” (Rowlands, 2021) through which we can assess the affective material generated by her work.

As part of her performance, Calle creates a drama of her relationship with Henri B., in which she appears to play the role of his infatuated lover, whilst denying that she was ever in love with him. Early in the text, she writes “I must not forget that I don’t have any amorous feelings toward Henri B. The impatience with which I await his arrival, the fear of that encounter, these symptoms aren’t really a part of me” (Calle, 1988, p.20). Yet later she tells another man she is in love with Henri B., using this as an alibi for her behaviour and to secretly enlist the man’s help in her project, writing “only love seems admissible” (Calle, 1988, p.38). She also notes her fear of an encounter with Henri B.’s wife and dreams of being chased by her and then having to rescue her from drowning. Here, Calle is playing with how her project may be perceived by others. She performs the role of a female lover pursuing a married man, and toys with the connection between desire, absence and romance. However, she denies the existence of any true romantic feelings and claims that what she feels is only a symptom created by her project. Baudrillard (1988) agrees with this sentiment and writes “nothing was to happen, not one event that might establish any contact or relationship between them,” (Baudrillard, 1988, p.78) and believes that her romantic feelings are the results of her game successfully simulating the experience of falling in love.

Morgan (2009) rejects this in favour of an ambivalent reading that, “Calle may be trying to talk herself into a romance or talk her readers out of believing that there ever was one” (Morgan, 2009, p.47). He concludes that the ambivalence here is evidence of fiction in Calle’s narrative and therefore she “must be regarded as partly or completely a fictional character” (Morgan, 2009, P.47). However, Morgan goes too far here and risks bringing his own gendered interpretation to the text. This is supported by Delvaux (2006) who finds an Oedipal relationship between Calle and the men in her works, noting that she primarily follows older men and employs desire and seduction without their explicit knowledge or consent. However, sex is absent in Calle’s work. She refuses the classic role of the Freudian feminine who desires the phallus and in doing so rejects the belief in “indubitable sexual identities” (Delvaux, 2006, p.164).

So, if she is not in love with Henri B., why does she implicate herself in this way? The answer comes from the function of desire in the text. In Calle’s work, desire is a “generative formal constraint” (Rowlands, 2021). She situates her projects around the absence of her subjects, a desiring of what she cannot have, and uses this to produce her material. If we believe that her romantic feelings are truly an unintentional response to her experiment in desire, then Calle is revealing a strong connection between our behaviours and our feelings for others. If we act as though we are someone’s lover, if we desire them when they are absent, then love will follow.

An exploration of the gendered aspects of Calle’s work leads us to consider her role as a writer-flâneuse. The word flâneur means “one who wanders aimlessly” (Elkin, 2016, p.3) but is also an “observer of modern urban life” (Tate, 2025), who travels city streets with a keen eye for observations of human traits and behaviour. Saint (2011) identifies Calle’s approach as including several features of flânerie including “amateur detective work, ambivalent impressions of mastery and fragility, the risk of lapsing into psychopathology or crime, and parody by a postmodern flâneuse of the male gaze of the flâneur” (Saint, 2011, p.127).

On her first night in disguise, Calle observes a man following her. Later she takes off her wig and encounters the same man again, noticing, “he doesn’t pay any attention to me now” (Calle, 1988, p.20). Calle does not offer a commentary but invites the reader to compare the man’s motivations with Calle’s own. Calle’s follower is implicitly attracted by the aesthetics of her blonde wig and doesn’t even notice her when she changes back to brunette. This implies a motivation rooted in visual desire and the male gaze (Berger, 2008), whereas her own interest in Henri B. is neither erotic, nor casual curiosity. Instead, it is a conceptual experiment that investigates the mechanics of following and the affective responses it creates. In keeping with this she writes, “A dread is taking hold of me: He recognized me, he’s following me, he knows” (Calle, 1988, p.9). Calle fears an unmasking and momentarily becomes an object being watched. This dramatizes the instability of identity at the core of her project. Calle’s place in the narrative constantly shifts between watcher and the one being watched and this enables her to experiment with the mechanics of the gaze, e.g. the male gaze of her observers and her own feminine gaze through which she observes Henri B. It is this feminine gaze that generates the debate around her motivations for the project. Calle claims to reject the conventional excuses of desire, eroticism and voyeurism in favour of a gaze motivated by playful experimentation. This draws attention to the importance of the motivations of the watcher and opens up possibilities for feminine subversions of the conventional gaze.

In her analysis of the feminine flâneuse, Elkin uncovers the historical context of the term and its associations with the “streetwalker” or “prostitute” (Elkin, 2016, p.8), however, she rejects this association as it fails to account for the empowerment of the flâneur as “someone who has slipped the bounds of responsibility” (Elkin, 2016, p.8). Similarly, Brady (2022) evaluates the role of women in capitalist society in the context of Lisa Robertson’s work and concludes that “women are marked as the abject and monstrous ciphers of both reproduction and consumption” (Brady, 2022). However, Brady argues that the flâneuse offers women the ability to “refuse to be useful” (Brady, 2022), that is, to reject this role and forge new paths and new identities through freedom from the responsibilities of capitalist life. Elkin supports this and argues that the image of the flâneuse is open for reclamation by contemporary women wishing to invert traditional gender dynamics and take pleasure in the freedom of urban exploration (Elkin, 2016). By choosing to follow Henri B., Calle upends gender norms and reconstitutes flânerie as an act of emotional self-discovery.

However, in her examination of Suite Vénitienne , Elkin acknowledges that her performance as a flâneuse is still susceptible to normative gendered interpretations related to the act of following. A man following a woman is readily interpreted as a “passionate pursuit”, while “a woman following a man is subservient.” (Elkin, 2016, p.143). However, I would argue that these interpretations are now dated and unlikely to be universally accepted; a man following a woman can now equally be viewed as creepy, stalking or illegal behaviour. Despite this, Elkin’s analysis here offers a useful warning about the risks inherent in this kind of work. Firstly, that the reader will bring their own value judgements to the piece which the writer cannot fully predict or control, and secondly that the flâneuse risks losing her own identity in the act of following. In Suite Vénitienne , Calle is careful to avoid this by curating her material and taking charge of the image of herself that she presents in the text.

Calle plays with her feminine identity throughout the text and takes pleasure in her ability to deceive others. She writes, “today, for the first time in my life, someone called me a good-looking blond” (Calle, 1988, P.10). Throughout the project, she learns that she can find power in disguise and carefully controlling her image; however, she also claims an image of vulnerability for herself by including examples of real-world risk she was exposed to during the project. She is followed by a man early in the text and during her visit to the Island of the Dead cemetery, the caretaker locks her into his hut and says, “you were scared, no?”, when she asks to leave (Calle, 1988, p.56). Calle neither confirms nor denies this and offers no commentary on her emotional state or private thoughts during the encounter. In doing so, she encourages a traditional gendered reading of the encounter and invites the reader to decide whether they think the encounter was dangerous or not.

This gives female writers like Calle the opportunity to talk about their experiences in new ways. The flâneuse opens a space for dialogue between genders. Male readers get a glimpse into the life of a woman in public and a taste of what it feels like to be followed, to be uncomfortable and to be cornered. And yet Calle never claims the role of the victim; she always remains in control. During her encounter with the cemetery caretaker, she alludes to the danger and vulnerability of being cornered and locked in the hut with him. However, her depiction of the encounter recasts the gaze back onto him, rendering him a character depicted on her terms. Calle shows us how flânerie offers us opportunities to reclaim narratives of our identities, of our urban spaces through play and experiment. This empowers us to explore not just urban space, but the emotional space created by our relationships with others and our environments.

Suite Vénitienne finds itself in dialogue with urban spaces through the language of the dérive, an exercise in which cities become “rich centers of possibilities and meanings” (Debord, 1958) that can be explored by abandoning the usual motivations for exploring a place and allowing oneself to be “drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there” (Debord, 1958). Her project injects an element of playfulness and feeling into the urban landscape that “resists the sterilisation of urban planning” and “reintroduces play to the city.” (Armstrong, 2017, p.132). This functions as a kind of “appropriation of space” concerned with “re-establishing meaningful relationships with our environment.” (Armstrong, 2017, p.133).

In a dérive, the qualities of a space are readily exposed and revealed to have a hidden dimension. Cities are not random spaces but are the product of capitalist decision making. Debord observes that “Cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones” (Debord, 1958). This is the side of Venice that Sophie Calle presents – a patchwork of streets, plazas, hotels, cafés and tourist destinations that embody the city’s productivity circuits.

However, Suite Vénitienne is not a dérive in the traditional sense. Instead of drifting by being drawn to follow a particular route across a space, Calle’s movement originates with her pursuit of Henri B. This introduces a psychological component that reframes her dérive as an experiment in affective response. Her exploration moves beyond physical space and into the relational space. Calle explores “the space between the sexes” (Delvaux, 2006, p.152) and finds herself in the zone between intimacy and anonymity, between “getting to know” someone (Hand, 2005, p.477) and the impossibility of ever fully knowing them. By refusing the cathartic resolution of a new relationship, Calle crafts a tone of endless desire in which true connection is out of reach.

This takes us to the realm of alienation. In Suite Vénitienne, Sophie’s photos depict solitary figures, and scarcely populated plazas and streets, which resonate with “the detachment of life in the modern metropolitan city.” (Ransom Note, 2017). In The S ociety of the Spectacle, Debord (2014) posits that capitalist society has become separated from reality through the mass production of images, or representations of reality, and that this leads to alienation. As a photo-textual piece, Suite Vénitienne both documents this condition and participates in it, becoming another mediated representation of the reality it critiques.

However, Calle’s approach to the project embodies the process of separation in a more fundamental way, through the act of self-submission and disappearance. In his analysis of the text, Baudrillard investigates how the mechanics of following (or shadowing) and photography constitute an act of doubling and disappearance for both the follower and the one followed. Early in the text, before she has located Henri B., Calle notices this loss of self when she reflects on her obsessive desire to find him and writes, “he is consuming me” (Calle, 1988, p.10). She manages to “exist only in the trace of the other” and assimilates her identity into the role of “a mirror” (Baudrillard, 1988, p.76).

However, the traces Calle collects in the form of diary entries and photographs do not serve a documentary purpose. Baudrillard writes “to shadow another is to give him, in fact, a double life, a parallel existence” (Baudrillard, 1988, p.78-79). They are not a real record of Henri B.’s actual visit to Venice but instead form a narrative of Calle’s pursuit of him. This supplants his presence in the text and creates a portrait of absence in his place. He notes that photography supports this process by capturing images that “preserves him vanished on film” but also “saves nothing of the other but his vanished presence” (Baudrillard, 1988, p.86). The traces in the text are detached from the reality they depict and therefore form a hyperreal simulacrum of Henri B., instead of a representation of the man himself. Calle has erased his traces and created his double.

In doing so, Calle finds her way back into the text as the creator of the illusion. Everything we see comes from the lens of her gaze, which filters and distorts reality to the point where her narrative exists independently of her real-life project. Baudrillard notes that distant observation and no-contact are critical rules to this process. To violate this would break the illusion “at the risk of the story’s falling into banality” (Baudrillard, 1988, p.78). In her act of following Henri B. without his awareness or consent, Calle creates an asymmetry in their relationship that enables her to claim control over the narrative. She writes, “there is such a gap between his thoughts and mine. I’m the only one dreaming. Henri B.’s feelings do not belong in my story.” (Calle, 1988, p.24).

Baudrillard summarises: “the shadowing makes the other vanish into the consciousness of the one who follows him” (Baudrillard, 1988, p.86). Baudrillard refers to this process as a ritual of seduction , an undermining of reality by its transformation into illusion, and sees this as a route to empowerment. By employing seduction, through the playful manipulation of signs (traces), we gain power over the systems of meaning and can reclaim reality according to our own desires.

Though the text is illusory in nature, the affective qualities of Calle’s experiment remain. Her emotions persist in the text and are experienced vicariously by the reader; we feel her anxiety, tension, curiosity and longing. For writers this offers up numerous avenues to explore. We can appropriate the tools of following and photography to craft our own illusions of others and explore the emotional content of our narrative with them embodying fragments of their lives, interests and personalities into our own texts. Or, as Calle demonstrates in Suite Vénitienne , we can craft narratives of absence in which we explore the gap between ourselves and the unaware strangers who weave in and out of our own personal narratives. We can use this to consider how fully fictional narratives can generate emotional reactions to characters that never existed. Or we can reflect on how we can transmute our own real-life emotional experiences into the fictional texts we write, to imbue fiction with subjective emotional truth.

Suite Vénitienne is an auto-fictional text that transcends the boundaries of “truth” and fiction in multiple ways. In doing so, it offers a model for writing about how places make us feel and our own interior emotional landscapes. As a female writer and a flâneuse, Calle offers a vision of reclamation which writers of any gender can use to reassert control over their own identities, to escape from normative societal roles, and to explore complex emotional landscapes through the tools of urban exploration, play, following and observation. The text situates itself in the gap between reality and simulacra, providing an example of how emotional truth and affective responses can transcend the gap between the two to offer up new possibilities for writers to explore emotional content.

As an exploration of the often-alienating impact of modern urban spaces, the text encourages us to reclaim our physical environments and transform them into a rich tapestry of emotion and memory that we can offer up in our writing. Reading Suite Vénitienne is like exploring an unfamiliar city for the first time; it becomes more familiar with each reading and yet remains unknowable in its entirety. This implies the possibility of a link between writing and exploration, and between reading and discovery. Navigating a city becomes a form of reading, in which streets, buildings and plazas become language and our memories and emotions provide the meaning. Conversely, reading becomes an act of navigation, helping us to better explore the intangible and the unspoken affects of our physical world, and offering us a form of escape from the sterility of the capitalist terrain.

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