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Antoine d’Agata

Born in Marseilles, Antoine d’Agata left France in 1983 and travelled 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. 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 in Paris, followed by Stigma (2004), Manifeste (2005), Psychogéographie (2005), Ice (2011), Position(s) (2012), Antibodies (2014), Fukushima (2015), Index (2015), Lilith (2017), and Self-Portraits: 1987–2017 (2017) 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. In 2012 his film Atlas was released. His recent film is White Noise (240 min., 2019). His work has been shown in exhibitions all over the world: Antoine d’Agata: Anticorps, Fotomuseum Den Haag, 2012, Le Bal, Paris, 2013; Spazio Forma, Milan, 2013; Atsukobarouh, Tokyo, 2015. His recent solo exhibition Self Portraits and Night Journeys, was shown at Magnum Print Room, London, 2018. Since 2005 Antoine d’Agata has had no settled place of residence but has worked around the world. Until today he published 54 books.

“If there is an artist capable of making these vacuums speak, it is d’Agata. To show what is not visible, to make present what can not be represented. There is a visual 'spectralism' about Antoine. It is about recording the spasms of humanity that is committing suicide, which has access to all the information needed to know what it is doing, and yet does nothing to revert the trend. We documented this suicide during a week of shared driving, of stays in shady hotels, and of exploring a place between two worlds which has become unliveable: a world of a spectral representation of reality and a world that is excluded from this representation, that lives only in a ghost-like state.” Mehdi Belhaj Kacem

Bibliography
  • community
  • contemporary art
  • France
  • social movements
  • revolution
  • photography