Description

From the first day of confinement following the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic, Antoine d’Agata roamed the streets of Paris with a thermal camera to record the viral epidemic that turned the city into a strange theatre of wandering souls, bowed heads and fleeing bodies. Initially attracted by the way in which the thermodynamic device records the various infrared rays (heat waves) emitted by bodies, which vary according to their temperature, the artist was soon fascinated by a process that reduces human subjects to essential figures, devoid of superfluous characteristics or specificities.

It is in this ambivalence between solidarity and contamination, this inevitability of social and physiological death, that I tried to apprehend, traversing a language of senses and of resistance that transfigures the body. The thermal image freezes forms, postures, figures, poses, zones imperceptible to the naked eye

Antoine d'Agata
© Antoine d'Agata | Magnum Photos

Born in Marseilles, Antoine d’Agata left France in 1983 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, in 1991-92, d’Agata worked as an intern in the editorial department of Magnum.

After a four-year hiatus he began working on self-assigned projects that documented the darker corners of society in his home country of France and beyond. Shooting in his signature graphic black and white, his images are often provocative, regularly inserts himself in the story. Since 2005 Antoine d’Agata has had no settled place of residence but has worked around the world. He joined Magnum in 2004.

© Antoine d'Agata | Magnum Photos

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