Hardcover 1st edition
Xavier Barral (2013)
560 pages
2400 bw and color photos
hardback 20,0 cm x 27,0 cm
Franch

Winner of the Rencontres d’Arles 2013 Author Book Award.

Huge French retrospective of the work of Antoine d’Agata produced to accompany his major exhibition in Paris. Beautiful reproductions and its grand size makes this possibly the best collection of his works ever produced.

“The slow ruin of a man with no ties, a refugee from a long expedition, which repeats itself from room to room.”
Antoine d’Agata does not stage the world he photographs, he is merely the silent witness, the assiduous spectator. He plunges himself into it headlong, and carries us along with him in these ordinary or extreme experiences of the flesh, the void, death and pleasure. There is an essential quality to his work, as well as an urgency.
An autobiographical journal, the chronological tale of a disorderly path, an intimate confrontation that feeds on the photographer’s unique capacity to root out an elaborate but instantaneous language from lived situations, this book offers a vertiginous dive into the night, which forges Agata’s thoughts on the power relations between two antagonistic worlds. From social alienation to the solidarity of the flesh, from immorality to the transparency of amorality, from politics to pornography, from intoxication to narcotic prostration, from speech to instinct, from sensual confusion to hysteria, from perception to action, from unconscious absorption of the world to lucidity.

Born in Marseilles, Antoine d’Agata left France in 1983 and remained overseas for the next ten years. Finding himself in New York in 1990, he pursued an interest in photography by taking courses at the International Center of Photography, where his teachers included Larry Clark and Nan Goldin.

During his time in New York , in 1991-92, d’Agata worked as an intern in the editorial department of Magnum, but despite his experiences and training in the US, after his return to France in 1993 he took a four-year break from photography. His first books of photographs, De Mala Muerte and Mala Noche, were published in 1998, and the following year Galerie Vu began distributing his work. In 2001 he published Hometown, and won the Niépce Prize for young photographers. He continued to publish regularly: Vortex and Insomnia appeared in 2003, accompanying his exhibition 1001 Nuits, which opened in Paris in September; Stigma was published in 2004, and Manifeste in 2005.

In 2004 d’Agata joined Magnum Photos and in the same year, shot his first short film, Le Ventre du Monde (The World’s Belly); this experiment led to his long feature film Aka Ana, shot in 2006 in Tokyo.

Since 2005 Antoine d’Agata has had no settled place of residence but has worked around the world.