French photographer Sophie Calle accepts Hasselblad Award

Oct 30, 2010, 15:49 GMT

Stockholm - French photographer and artist Sophie Calle on Saturday accepted the 30th Hasselblad Award for her 'groundbreaking, utterly original' work.

Calle received the photography award, worth 1 million kronor (140,000 dollars), along with a diploma and a gold medal at a ceremony in the Swedish west coast city of Gothenburg.

An exhibition of her work, mainly in black-and-white, from the series True Stories also opened at the Hasselblad Centre.

A five-member international panel said that Calle's work had 'been questioning and challenging the relationship between text and photography' for 30 years.

Calle, born in 1953, won acclaim in 1980 for her project Suite Venitienne where she followed and documented a stranger visiting Venice, and published the photos along with a diary.

Other projects have included working as a chambermaid in a hotel - also in Venice - where she examined the lives of total strangers through their personal items.

The Hasselblad award was named after Victor Hasselblad (1906-1978) who invented the Hasselblad cameras that have been used in NASA space programmes and by a number of famous photographers.

Former Hasselblad Award winners include Robert Frank, Josef Koudelka, Richard Avedon, Sebastiao Salgado, Hiroshi Hamaya, Susan Meiselas, Ernst Haas, Irving Penn, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ansel Adams, and Lennart Nilsson.

More information can be found on: www.hasselbladfoundation.org.

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