201 - Antoine D'Agata

A Small Voice: Conversations With Photographers

Antoine D'Agata is a French photographer and film director and a full member of Magnum Photos. His photographic subjects have mostly been those on the fringes of society and his work deals with topics often considered taboo, such as addiction, sex, personal obsessions, darkness, and prostitution.

Born in Marseilles in 1961, Antoine left France in his early 20s 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, Antoine worked as an intern in the editorial department of Magnum Photos, but 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.

Since 2005 Antoine d’Agata has had no settled place of residence but has worked around the world. He is currently based in Paris.

In episode 201, Antoine discusses, among other things:

• Wanting to become a priest at 15
• Sacrifice
• Moving to London
• Situationism
• His intro to photography before he took pictures
• Being accepted into the ICP as a ’social experiment’
• Being ‘ashamed’ of having left the street
• Critics not having the full facts
• Moments of Paroxsysm
• The question for morality and ethics
• Quitting photography for 4-5 years
• Cambodia, his book Ice, Crystal Meth and the consequences of using it
• How he manages to endure the banality of the real world
• Contamination
• His Covid project with a heat sensitive camera
• His commitment to and passion for teaching workshops

Referenced:

• Luc Delahaye
• Moises Saman

Instagram

“I didn’t want to betray in any way what I was or what I was doing, so I needed to find different ways to keep going without negating what I believed in, and photography seemed to be the only considerable way to do it…”

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