Antoine d’Agata

Born in Marseille in 1961, Antoine d’Agata left France in the early 1980s. He studied photography at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York in 1990, alongside Larry Clark and Nan Goldin. Since 2008, he has been a member of Magnum Photos and has published more than a dozen books and over three feature-length films.

Antoine d’Agata photographs fragile figures who free themselves from social regulation by reclaiming control over their own bodies. They emancipate themselves from physical deprivation, evade order, and access the last magical rites of instinct. They belong to the margins of the so-called civilised world, where a sheltered form of humanity prevails.

He defines photography as a practice intrinsically tied to the formation of a position rooted in lived experience. Photography is, for him, a strategy of social warfare founded on chaos and violence, intransigence and patience.

Antoine d’Agata has not settled anywhere permanently and continues to work and live across the world.

He received the Niépce Prize for young photographers for the series “Home Town” in 2001 and the International Photography Festival Award, Higashikawa, Hokkaido, Japan, in 2004.

His work can be found in public and private collections including the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, France; the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, France; the Musée Nicéphore Niépce, Chalon-sur-Saône, France; DG Bank, Frankfurt, Germany; Forum für Fotografie, Cologne, Germany; and the Noorderlicht Collection, Groningen, the Netherlands, among others.