Hasselblad Awards 2010

True Stories is the book for Sophie Calle’s 2010 Hasselblad Award, published by Steidl with the Hasselblad Foundation.

The foundation named Calle its thirtieth award winner in 2010. Its citation says that for more than three decades she has questioned how text and photography relate, how the private and the public self differ, and where truth ends and fiction begins. The award was presented at the Göteborg City Theatre on 30 October 2010, when an exhibition of her work opened at the Hasselblad Center in the Göteborg Museum of Art. Steidl’s page for the book opens with Calle’s own account of 5 October 2002, when she spent the night in a bed set up at the top of the Eiffel Tower and asked visitors to tell her stories to keep her awake. The book has 111 pages, is clothbound and in English, and appeared in June 2010.

The citation calls her work conceptual and says it deals with human vulnerability, with identity and intimacy, and with how official history gets made.