Chris Marker

 

Stills taken from Chris Marker's 1962 film 'La Jetée', currently part of an exhibition of his work at The Whitechapel Gallery. 

The film is made of up of black and white photographs which come together to play out as a photo montage at varying speeds. It's an eery, unnerving film but worth seeing if only for all the beautiful shots of Hélène Chatelain, the film's heroine.

I especially love the couples' trip to a museum filled with taxidermy.

 

I first saw the film as part of my course in Manchester. Suitably the art history block backed on to Manchester Museum which was filled to the rafters with taxidermy and where I often ended up wasting time in between lectures and buying endless tatt.

Sophie Calle, The Hotel

I came across these photo montages by Sophie Calle last week when flicking through the pages of a photography book I always keep near my desk. The Hotel pictures show the various belongings of anonymous hotel guests and were captured secretly by Calle who worked as a temporary chambermaid in Venice during the early 1980s. I find these secret photographs so intriguing as I'm interested in all the different parts that make up who someone is. Clothes, jewellery etc are so central to this, which is one of the reasons I enjoy doing One Off's Style Profiles so much. And so my book tells me: 'The importance of Calle's art has been to raise questions about just what it is that interests us: the ordinary fabric of other people's lives'.