The Hotel

The Hotel is an audacious and elegant work of conceptual art disguised as intimate reportage. In 1981 Sophie Calle took a job as a chambermaid in a Venetian hotel and used her cleaning routine as a pretext to explore the lives of strangers. Armed with a hidden camera and a tape recorder in her mop bucket, she documented guests’ rooms as though conducting a forensic inventory—bedsheets, luggage, perfume bottles, letters, diaries, even the placement of discarded chocolates and shoes.

Each chapter focuses on a different room and the traces left behind by guests—illuminating absence through the small, mundane details that become uncanny markers of identity. Calle photographs Venetian interiors in rich color, then zooms in with stark black-and-white images of underwear, toiletries, and personal effects to create what feels like a visual diary of emotional residue.

What at first seems like voyeurism quickly reveals itself as a meditation on trust, privacy, and how identity is shaped by what we leave behind. As readers move through the rooms alongside Calle, they become implicated in her act of looking. This uneasy complicity—straddling art and intrusion—forces a reassessment of boundaries between observer and observed, art and exposure.

Published in English for the first time as a standalone volume by Siglio Press, this exquisitely produced edition includes previously unpublished photographs and larger, enhanced layouts that transform the book into an experience that feels both archival and artful.

The Hotel is not simply documentation—it is a daring exploration of the everyday traces that remain when people depart. It invites readers to question what they see, what they imagine, and what they’re willing to discover in the thin space between curiosity and consent.