Image copyright Antoine D'Agata
Nothing new here in terms of work but I just can't get away from Antoine D'Agata's work. The most refreshing and perhaps surprising member of magnum photography.
“The night, the sex, the wandering… and the need to photograph it all, not so much the perceived act but more like a simple exposure to common and even extreme experiences… It is an inseparable part of photographic practice, in a certain sense, to grasp at existence or risk, desire, the unconsciousness and chance, all of which continue to be essential elements. No moral posturing, no judgement, simply the principle of affirmation, necessary to explore certain universes, to go deep inside, without any care. A ride into photography to the vanishing point of orgasm and death.”
“I photograph to face the world. I engage the same inexhaustible protocol, traversing and being traversed by experiences whose common denominator is excess. Confronting the inherent contradictions to the use of documentary photography, I document what I live and live the situations I document. I structure a physical and psychic path overshadowed by risk, hazard, desire and unconsciousness in a frantic search for the feeling of being alive,being part of life, belonging to life. To give a transcription of my position in the social and physical order, to escape organic and political passivity, I invent a scenario that I condemned myself to live out, to the letter and in the flesh.”
— Antoine D’Agata
D'Agata seems to live on the edge, and yet it still doesn't seem to satisfy his sexual fix. Powerful, shocking, empty and beautiful.... his images have it all and after viewing them for the umpteenth time, I still don't know how to feel - except I know I bleeding love 'em. Antoine D'Agata, a cross between Robert Capa and Henri Cartier Bresson on smack!
