Doubling: in his photographs, d’Agata is no longer d’Agata but A, his double—but who is the double of whom? Who is the secondary and who is the primary when one no longer knows whether one photographs what one lives or lives in order to be able to photograph, in order to be able to stop photographing?
Antoine d’Agata is a French photographer and filmmaker born in 1961 in Marseille. He lived and travelled across around ten countries before settling in New York in 1991, where he enrolled at the International Center of Photography (ICP), studying notably with Larry Clark and Nan Goldin.
An actor within a nocturnal universe he explores alongside society’s outsiders and marginalized figures, he dedicates his practice to the revelation of truth—however brutal it may be. A member of the Magnum Photos agency since 2004, he approaches his subjects through an exceptionally intimate and subjective stance. Central to his approach, the body is understood as political. Shaped by social determinants, it is seen as finding release only through extreme states reached via drugs, sex, and proximity to death.
In 2024, several of his works were presented in the group exhibition Entre les lignes at MO.CO. & MO.CO. Panacée in Montpellier, where he showed a series focused on the war in Ukraine, in dialogue with other artists. Earlier, in 2018, he participated in Eyes Wild Open at Le Botanique in Brussels and Quel Amour !? at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Marseille, as well as other international projects such as Codex at the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City in 2017 and a solo exhibition at La Térmica in Málaga in 2015.
Among his notable publications, Anticorps (2013) accompanied a major exhibition at Le BAL in Paris, while Odysseia was presented the same year at the MuCEM in Marseille.