Antoine D'Agata has traveled the world's darkest corners collecting images of characters from the night's furthest edges: prostitutes, addicts, war-torn communities, and the homeless, published in a book in 1998
Antoine d’Agata
"It's not how a photographer looks at the world that is important. It's their intimate relationship with it."
- Antoine d’Agata
Antoine d’Agata was born on November 19, 1961, in Marseille, France. At the age of 17, he interrupted his studies to live in the world of the night. For 12 years, he lived and traveled in some 20 countries. In 1991, while living in New York with no photographic experience, he enrolled at the International Center of Photography, where he studied with Nan Goldin and Larry Clark. In 1993, he moved to France, worked as a bricklayer, and stopped his photographic practice until 1997.
Mala Noche, his first book, was published in 1998. In 2001, he received the Niépce Prize. 1001 Nuits was exhibited in Paris in September 2003 and accompanied by the publication of two books, Vortex and Insomnia. In 2004, D’Agata joined Magnum Photos, published his fifth book, Stigma, and made his first short film, El Cielo del muerto. In 2006, he shot his second film, Aka Ana, in Tokyo. His latest, a four-hour feature called White Noise (2019), brought together the voices of twenty-four women. He won the Photographic Book Prize at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2013 for Anticorps, published the same year for a major exhibition at Le Bal, Paris.
Antoine d’Agata’s work can be read as an exploration of contemporary violence from two distinct perspectives: the violence of the day, or economic and political violence (migration, refugees, poverty and war), and the violence of the night, or violence generated by social groups marginalized by poverty (survival through crime, narcotic addiction, sexual excess). His latest books are VIRUS (2020), which documents the Covid-19 pandemic, and Antoine d’Agata — Francis Bacon (2020), which brings together the works of both artists.
For the past 30 years, Antoine d’Agata has lived and photographed all over the world and has published some 50 works. He has been a full member of the Magnum Photos agency since 2008. Internationally renowned, his work has been featured as the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, shown in various museums, and included in public and private collections throughout the world.
