{"id":255,"date":"2014-04-11T01:27:25","date_gmt":"2014-04-11T01:27:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/blog\/?p=255"},"modified":"2020-03-24T18:38:02","modified_gmt":"2020-03-24T18:38:02","slug":"compiled-interviews-antoine-dagata","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/journal\/compiled-interviews-antoine-dagata\/","title":{"rendered":"Compiled Interviews: ANTOINE D\u2019AGATA"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><script>\n  (function(i,s,o,g,r,a,m){i['GoogleAnalyticsObject']=r;i[r]=i[r]||function(){\n  (i[r].q=i[r].q||[]).push(arguments)},i[r].l=1*new Date();a=s.createElement(o),\n  m=s.getElementsByTagName(o)[0];a.async=1;a.src=g;m.parentNode.insertBefore(a,m)\n  })(window,document,'script','https:\/\/www.google-analytics.com\/analytics.js','ga');<\/p>\n<p>  ga('create', 'UA-33681611-1', 'auto');\n  ga('send', 'pageview');<\/p>\n<p><\/script><\/p>\n<p>\u201c\u2026\u00a0<em>I don\u2019t believe in photography as art or a job or anything. I think of photography as a language and I think a language should be used to speak, to say what you have to say. So the only things I have to say about my life and what I know about the world, is the way I see it. So, it\u2019s not about photography \u2026 I think people should just use photography to say things and not just photography for the sake of photography \u2026 the world is full of talented photographers. The problem is just so many of them just don\u2019t know what to say, they think life is one thing and photography is another but they don\u2019t realise that photography is just a way to reflect what you are.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p>https:\/\/youtu.be\/CaQtagZPHiU<\/p>\n<div class=\"entry-content clearfix\">\n<div>\n<h1>FEAR, DESIRE, DRUGS, AND FUCKING<\/h1>\n<h2><strong>PHOTOGRAPHER ANTOINE D\u2019AGATA LIVES A LIFE LESS ORDINARY<\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>By Alex Sturrock, Antoine D\u2019Agata<\/p>\n<p>Original Link:\u00a0http:\/\/www.vice.com\/read\/fear-desire-drugs-fucking-608-v17n11<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div align=\"left\"><a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040\/http:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/beast-with-two-backs.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040im_\/http:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/beast-with-two-backs.jpg\" alt=\"beast-with-two-backs\" width=\"625\" height=\"726\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<div align=\"left\"><\/div>\n<div align=\"left\">Antoine D\u2019Agata is a contentious character in the worlds of photography and art. Signed up by the Magnum photo agency in the period when they started to realise there was little money in photojournalism, his work\u2019s brutal and self-destructive content has a habit of upsetting people.Born in Marseilles in 1961, D\u2019Agata left France in the early 80s. He later studied at the International Center of Photography in New York alongside Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, with whom he shares a fascination for the seamier side of things. D\u2019Agata has lived a murky and nomadic life. He regularly immerses himself in his subjects, which typically tend to be prostitutes and other marginalised misfits, often throwing himself into dangerous, drug-addled and sex-fuelled situations. We spoke with him about photography as art, honesty, morality and what it\u2019s like to be addicted to the drug ice while living with Cambodian prostitutes.<\/div>\n<div align=\"left\"><\/div>\n<div align=\"left\"><strong>Vice: Which artists are you interested in, in particular those who aren\u2019t photographers?<\/strong><\/div>\n<div align=\"left\"><strong>Antoine D\u2019Agata:<\/strong><strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/div>\n<div align=\"left\"><\/div>\n<div align=\"left\">I respect artists who have the courage to live up to the madness of their art. C\u00e9line, Artaud or Rimbaud are geniuses not for the dexterity or subtlety of their words but for their truth. I don\u2019t see art as competition or a spectacle but as a privileged space to give a radical form to one\u2019s perspective on the world. Art has long been the hostage of technique and today the criteria would be intelligence, not to say cynicism. But I look at art when I sense there\u2019s space there for excess and despair. I didn\u2019t have a chance to consider the history of art. I look at Georges Grosz because I find there, instinctively, the monstrosity of society, and in Francis Bacon\u2019s, of the flesh. I look at art when it is shouted or vomited, not conceptualised or marketed.<\/div>\n<div align=\"left\"><\/div>\n<div align=\"left\"><strong>How would you describe your own work\u2014as reportage, as art? Do you feel that photos can be an honest and effective way to convey a situation?<\/strong><\/div>\n<div align=\"left\"><strong><br \/>\n<\/strong>The only type of connection I have to the tradition of reportage is coming up with the most efficient ways to deny, denounce or destroy its prejudice. Beyond humanistic pretence, reportage always conveys twisted or insidious values. Its economic survival has always been dependent on logical means to perpetuate the efficiency and the profitability of a system controlled by the elite for their own benefit. And one has to remember that no photography can pretend to show the truth. A picture only shows a given situation under a very specific perspective, consciously or not, openly or not, relevantly or not. Photographers have to accept they can just convey fragments of illusory realities and relate their own intimate experience of the world. In this process of fictionalising an unreachable truth, it\u2019s up to them to impose their doubts about any photographic truth, or accept being impotent pawns in the mediatic game.<\/div>\n<div align=\"left\"><\/div>\n<div align=\"left\"><strong>You\u2019ve spoken in the past about photography not being art. What are your thoughts on photography as art? Can you explain how you see photography as opposed to art?<\/strong><\/div>\n<div align=\"left\"><strong><br \/>\n<\/strong>I do think of photography as a perfectly legitimate artistic language, but I believe it is underused or misused most of the time. The world is not made out of what we see but from what we do. Photographers who ignore this state of things\u2014and today, as in the past, most of them do\u2014reduce photography to its capacity for recording reality. They don\u2019t take responsibility for their position while looking at the world and end up assuming voyeuristic, sociological or aesthetic stands. Contrary to writing or painting, you have to confront reality while photographing. The only decent way to do it is to make the best out of your own existence. From a moral point of view, you have to invent your own life, against fear and ignorance, and through the action. Intelligence and beauty don\u2019t compensate for passivity. The only way to keep one\u2019s dignity is to confront human condition and social context through direct action. It is a difficult balance one has to keep between the creation of situations to go through and the development of a narrative technique to share one\u2019s perspective. In this process, life overcomes art at some point, and art perverts life. By deliberately living in this constant tension, I expect to go through existence without having to give up lucidity or experience.<\/div>\n<div align=\"left\"><\/div>\n<div align=\"left\"><strong>Do you think your work has much in common with, say, that of Nan Goldin\u2019s?<\/strong><\/div>\n<div align=\"left\">\n<p>The few photographers who, like Nan Goldin, have influenced me as I was trying to get accustomed to the history of the medium, have struggled to throw back some of the rawness of the world into photography. This language is often reduced to its capacity to be somehow neutral. What Nan Goldin has taught me is to stand up, against all odds, in a political and existential struggle for survival. I don\u2019t feel close to her because of some similar experience of marginal communities, or some alleged obsession with sex and drugs, but because she never gave up. She never hesitated to compromise her health or sanity for the sake of her work and I am just grateful to her for her courage and stubbornness, for staying faithful to her own pain, fear and desire.<\/p>\n<p><strong>You\u2019ve talked before about photography as a language\u2014do you ever feel trapped by the way in which you have communicated in the past, or do you enjoy having a unique voice?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><br \/>\n<\/strong>I am not sure I\u2019ll ever have the strength to make myself understood in a clear and coherent way. I came late to photography as a desperate attempt to stay alive, and I don\u2019t have the discipline or energy to always make sense in the way I try to communicate my understanding of things. My books are careless and full of flaws, my images are messy and my writing is awkward. But all these are just tools, not quite assimilated yet, in an absolutely determined search, that allows no concession or compromise. It is difficult to be as excessive as I am in my work and be completely efficient. Every book, every exhibition, every assignment is just one more small compromise I have to accept. Mistakes are my only possible way, but my route is my own.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Nan once said to me that everyone always says to her how dark your work is, but she thinks it looks like you are having a great time.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I guess reality is never as dark as the way I used to depict it, but I can\u2019t ignore the feelings that overwhelm me when I go through the horror of the world. Meanwhile, I leave out of my pictures the most dramatic and sordid elements, the appalling conditions of living faced by most of my characters. I try to express, in the most precise and arbitrary way, the indefinable and unbearable beauty of keeping alive, physically, mentally and emotionally, for those who don\u2019t own anything but their own bodies and sell them to survive.<\/p>\n<p>Most of my photographic strategies are aimed at reaching the highest levels of pleasure or unconsciousness and, in this sense, sex and drugs are highly enjoyable working methods. Part of my recent work could be easily described as some chaotic and biased sociology of ecstasy. I live my life with people who use pleasure as a way to impose their existence and identity in a world that denies them every right. But pleasure can\u2019t be separated from pain and alienation. Pleasure is still a dark territory to me and I am exhausted exploring its limits. It\u2019s just a route. Satisfaction isn\u2019t the aim. Feeling might be the point. I\u2019m hooked on adrenaline.<\/p>\n<p><strong>I have read you talk about \u201cinnocent images\u201d. Do you see your own images as innocent?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>My images are innocent because they are accidental. I\u2019ve used every possible method I\u2019ve been able to come up with to give up control. I\u2019ll use whatever I can put my hand on\u2014alcohol, drugs, rage, sex or fear\u2014to push my own limits and make sure the final image is not an illustration or a statement. This doesn\u2019t mean I won\u2019t be a maniac when it comes to building the coherence of the work later. Each image is to some degree independent from my will. Each one is more a product of my nervous system than of my brain. And in the world we live in, I see this type of innocence as subversive in the contemporary struggle between the obscene forces of abstraction, of moral, of religion and the mechanics of the flesh. The instinct against the mind, the ultimate strength of those whose only way to emancipate themselves from physical deprivation, is orgy.<\/p>\n<p><strong><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040\/http:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/shadowed-profile.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-265\" src=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040im_\/http:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/shadowed-profile.jpg\" alt=\"shadowed-profile\" width=\"625\" height=\"812\" \/><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>I think when Nan was really high she saw and photographed the world very differently. Do you think that your work is shaped in a similar way?<\/strong><strong>So being high actively helps in creating that innocence?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><br \/>\n<\/strong>Through the tension released in narcotic drunkenness, through these bare moments of high emotional fragility, I can explore a sense of annihilation born out of it that I couldn\u2019t reach otherwise. I said drugs allow me not to think too much. They give me the raw energy to break all barriers, and to go beyond acceptable limits. They open a perspective on new possible strategies. As far as I am concerned, I\u2019m done with fighting inhibition through excessive consumption of alcohol. But there\u2019s a new generation of synthetic drugs which allow you to destroy yourself while, on the way, damaging the efficiency and sanity of the system. While fucking and getting high, I reduce myself to a state that is a weird mix of flesh, emptiness and panic. A bare state of being, a most innocent way to experience the world that is essential before trying to make sense out of it.<\/p>\n<p>Like Nan, I do what I can to create my own route. Like her, I don\u2019t like the idea of looking at the world and I speak about my experiences. It is occasionally acceptable to be a viewer, a spectator, but I use drugs because they make me act and react differently. Drugs can\u2019t be reduced to some mystical way to open a perception of reality. I value the hardest and most physical drugs, which alter and intensify the confrontation to reality. Not the ones which allow you to escape to some fuzzy, comfortable or exotic state of mind. It all comes down to not being a consumer but to take the risk of your own destiny. To consume drugs the way you would consume a TV reality show wouldn\u2019t help. Drugs help me to feel, with my nerves and my stomach, where real life takes place. I don\u2019t know what real life is but I can\u2019t bear feeling anesthetised any more. I try every day to dig out the raw forces of instinct. In modern society, pleasure is the only norm. Everything is done to eradicate all traces of desire, rage, violence, pain, fear and all types of animal drive. Through drugs, through excess, I try to fall back to these essential levels of uncontrolled emotion.<\/p>\n<p><strong>As far as your own work goes, what purpose do you feel it serves? Did you have an aim in mind when you set out to work in Cambodia, for example?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><br \/>\n<\/strong>I wasn\u2019t looking for any kind of exotic context for any specific perversion. But I had the sense of a place where barriers are few and I knew I would encounter more of those people who are victims of global social violence and find, in their own despair, the strength to invent new ways to survive. In Cambodia, this happens through the use of new generations of cheap street drugs related to methamphetamine. I grew tired of the idea of transgression. But I tend to give a chance to immorality, the way it\u2019s been traditionally defined. Life is an impasse, and we have to make the best out of it. But I have my limits, due to my own cultural background. I don\u2019t have that many but they are not flexible. I don\u2019t make a moral issue out of it. It\u2019s just a matter of desire and integrity. To be on the side of innocence has always been at the heart of each one of my moves. I stick to this. It is not an ideology. It\u2019s an intimate philosophy, born out of experience and pain. I have been accused by some anonymous voices on the internet of many things. They are cowardly and insidious attacks. I know where I stand and don\u2019t feel I have to justify myself. As far as what others do with their lives, I don\u2019t judge but react to what I see and feel with my eyes, my heart and my brain.<\/p>\n<p><strong>What do you make of criticism of your work on the grounds that you are exploitative?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><br \/>\n<\/strong>As for most photographers, it is essential to me to deserve the trust of people I get close to. But unlike them, my ambition is to abolish any kind of political, emotional or physical distance with my subject. This process can only happen if you constantly show respect, love and compassion. My work quickly became even more of an autobiographical journal. This was my very personal way to step away from the traditional documentary photography methods, which I find very frustrating and hypocritical. There\u2019s a part of cowardice in the usual position of documentary photography in between voyeurism and safety. This is where exploitation lies. The last few years, I have been experimenting with new working methods, slowly abandoning the position behind the camera to enter the image itself, as a character within my own images. That\u2019s the only legitimate position. Photography is the only artistic language that has to be elaborate in the very same time that the experience it relates is taking place. I just use photography in the most coherent way, while experimenting with the world in the most intense way, trying to be responsible for my actions and acknowledging the existence and feelings of the persons I photograph.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><strong>Your images are very intense and sometimes feel violent. Does that reflect the relationships you have with some of the people in them?<\/strong><strong>The story \u201cCambodian Ice Triangle\u201d reflects some familiar aspects of your work: drugs, women and at times extremely unsettling images. To what extent is your work premeditated? Or is it more something that develops?<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong><br \/>\n<\/strong>The only strategy I can come up with is to follow people all the way in their excessive way of life. I never know where I am headed to but using photography, the way I use it, allows me to escape from the lethargic world that surrounds us. I am the actor of a scenario I develop in a very conscious manner. Self-destruction can be premeditated. More and more, I rely on other people to do the actual shooting, while keeping control, as much as possible, of the light, the perspective, the position of the camera, the angle of the lens towards the subject, the shutter speed. Of course, I lose some kind of control in this process but it allows me to stay, in an absolute way, something other than a mere spectator. The essential in the nature of the situation I provoke is the tension that is released beyond my control. My own personal strategy to go through the violence of the world isn\u2019t to avoid it but to go for it, and not to hurt anybody but myself on the way.<\/p>\n<p>The violence of the communities I submerge myself into is proportional and adapted to the violence of the economic and political elite. Any weapon will do. I see sex, drugs and criminality as perfectly legitimate ways to stay alive when you are treated as a non-accountable entity. To share time with my characters in the most authentic way, I need to go beyond sympathy or empathy. I don\u2019t want to understand the people I photograph. I want to be with them, but inside them. I don\u2019t want to look at the pain, but feel the pain. Solidarity has to go through the flesh. Words and thoughts are not worth much. They just help to identify the nature of the gap between the other and myself. The common experience of sex and drugs helps me to fill the gap. Prostitutes and drug addicts resist economic oppression and social alienation with their own body and destiny. Violence is part of that process; it\u2019s part of that world. Most people I meet in the margins of the cities had no choice and adapted to the conditions of life imposed upon them.<\/p>\n<p>As far as I am concerned it\u2019s been a more conscious process in my case, but in the end we share the same position in the world. I learned to accept better the legitimate and scandalous nature of ecstasy or violence. I learned to endure the pain: physically, nervously, and emotionally. I do everything I can to make sure I keep being vulnerable. I do everything I can to make sure fear never overcomes desire, and desire never overcomes compassion.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve had no home for years. I have the same nomadic habits I had all my life. I don\u2019t see my personal odyssey as a coming back to any mythical home. Movement towards the void, fear of the unknown and the instinct of survival define human existence. I try to live up and survive to my convictions, mistakes and doubts.<\/p>\n<p>*******************************************************************************<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>N.0008<\/div>\n<div><strong>Antoine d\u2019Agata interviewed by Arja Hyytiainen<\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Original Link:\u00a0http:\/\/www.gommamag.com\/v5\/gm_int.php?id=9<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040\/http:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/1311342704.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-267\" src=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040im_\/http:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/1311342704.jpg\" alt=\"1311342704\" width=\"579\" height=\"395\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div><em>Antoine d\u2019Agata was born in Marseille in 1961. In 1990 he undertook a photography course at the ICP in New York alongside Nan Goldin and Larry Clark, he then interned within the Editorial Department of Magnum in New York. In 1998 his first book, of many, was published entitled De Mala Muerte. In 2001 he received the highly acclaimed Ni\u00e9pce prize, later in 2004 he joined Magnum Photos and shot his first short film Ventre du Monde. He now lives and works in Paris.<\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div><em><br \/>\nArja Hyytiainen met Antoine in Paris for this exclusive interview:<\/em><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><strong>\u201cParis, first of August 2005, Avenue de la Republique.<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>A month earlier I met Antoine d\u2019Agata in Arles, setting up an appointment later on in Paris for an interview\u2026 a microphone on the floor\u2026\u00a0Antoine is speaking about travelling and the many places he lived in during the 80s\u201d<\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Between 1983 and 1993, I first lived in London, stayed two years in Brixton and then travelled to Central America, then back to London, off to Spain and then to America again. I also travelled to South America and India, and lived for five years in New York.\u00a0 It was twelve years of travelling including photography. I started photographing in 1990 when I joined the ICP and I stopped photographing between \u201993 and \u201997. Then, between the age of seventeen and twenty-two, I lived on the streets of Marseille, in squats, doing drugs, and all this\u2026 in a mess. So I guess I was very tired, shocked, too much\u2026 and I went to London just for a break at friends\u2019 places who lived in squats. I went for two weeks and ended up staying for two years.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><strong><em>And then you left for America?\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div>Well, London was even more drugs, it was getting very, very heavy, I think I left London just for\u2026<br \/>\nI could see that my friends got really involved and I was myself dealing drugs, heroin\u2026so it was like I had to leave in order not to get really deep down.<br \/>\n<em><br \/>\n<strong>What made you go to the ICP, (International Center of Photography) in NYC?<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<div>By the time I started the ICP, I had been travelling for many years and I think I was just really down the road, my friends had started to die of AIDS and I think I was just very depressed and didn\u2019t have the strength to keep going anymore, but I didn\u2019t want to betray all my old ideas so photography was a good way to take control of myself, to collect my thoughts,<br \/>\nto introduce control into my life without changing it. So, I could tell you in detail the story why, but it is not so important\u2026 basically a friend of mine was a photographer and he died, so I took over, kind of \u2026 he taught me. We made a trip to Mexico, it was his last trip and I started to think of photography as the way in which to record and keep in touch with life. It was a strange experience. These stupid rolls I took with him were the pictures I showed to get into the ICP.<br \/>\n<em><br \/>\n<strong>The ICP is a respected school and is also quite expensive\u2026<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<div>They took me as some kind of basic guinea pig. Joan Liftin was in charge of the forum and was tired of having these young students who were good photographers but didn\u2019t know anything about life.<br \/>\nI think she liked the idea of having somebody who didn\u2019t know how to expose film, how to develop film but who knew other things, who had ten years of experimentation.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><strong><em>But you knew about photography?\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div>I knew nothing, before the ICP I took five or ten rolls maybe, but I had these pictures where you could see one prostitute walking in the morning and three guys shooting heroin\u2026 so, she liked the idea.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><strong><em>Could I see these pictures somewhere?<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>No, some negatives probably exist but there are no prints of this, I don\u2019t even have a single working print; I keep nothing. Look what I have\u2026 (Antoine points around in the room, which is all empty, except for the furniture, a sofa and a desk with a computer. In the corner a cupboard with a glass-door, a few cameras and some CD\u2019s on the shelves.) That\u2019s it, and my clothes and some books. I have no working place. This is it. All my work is in galleries or has not been printed\u2026I never paid the ICP, so for years they were running after me and seven years later, in 1997, they called me in France, I thought it was to ask for money, but instead they called me in order to arrange a workshop in New York and so we exchanged.<br \/>\n<em><br \/>\n<strong>Larry Clark and Nan Goldin.\u00a0 Did you know about Larry Clark before?<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I learned everything about photography at the ICP, I had no idea about them. I just got to know about them a few months before I studied under them and obviously I really looked up to their work. I like their work very much but Larry Clark is not such a good teacher, it was a strange thing\u2026but I did meet a girlfriend in his class. It was a good way to get some social life; we all ended up having intimate affairs. Nan Goldin was a very good experience. I studied for three months with her.<br \/>\n<em><br \/>\n<strong>Did they leave any traces of their own style in your photography?<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Did Nan Goldin encourage you?<\/strong><\/em><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I think Nan Goldin was a real influence.\u00a0 She showed us the work of people she liked, including Petersen, Str\u00f6mholm, David Wojnarowitcz, all kind of her friends \u2026we just looked at pictures and basically she only looked for truth and sincerity in the images, which is not so easy to achieve. So it was a very, very good school.<br \/>\n<strong><em><br \/>\nIn 1995 you joined Bruno Le Dantec in Chiapas.<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In \u201993 I stopped photographing because I went back to Marseille. It\u2019s a complicated story, but basically, the guy I told you about in Mexico, when he died, I went to Marseille and stayed there for three years with his girlfriend and we had two kids. So for four years I stayed completely out of photography.<\/div>\n<div>In \u201995 I joined Bruno in Chiapas and in \u201997 I made two trips; one to Mexico and one to Haiti. This is when the story was breaking up in Marseille and I was starting over again with photography. So it was like a parenthesis but a long parenthesis, because before this I had just left the school. When I left the ICP I became an intern for some months at Magnum in N.Y and afterwards I didn\u2019t very much like the idea I got from photography, so I left for a few months. Basically I was working on the Mala Noche book.<br \/>\n<strong><em><br \/>\nBruno wrote that you came to Chiapas to find yourself again,<br \/>\nto look for another impulse.<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In \u201993 I stopped photographing because I went back to Marseille. It\u2019s a complicated story, but basically, the guy I told you about in Mexico, when he died, I went to Marseille and stayed there for three years with his girlfriend and we had two kids. So for four years I stayed completely out of photography.<\/div>\n<div>In \u201995 I joined Bruno in Chiapas and in \u201997 I made two trips; one to Mexico and one to Haiti. This is when the story was breaking up in Marseille and I was starting over again with photography. So it was like a parenthesis but a long parenthesis, because before this I had just left the school. When I left the ICP I became an intern for some months at Magnum in N.Y and afterwards I didn\u2019t very much like the idea I got from photography, so I left for a few months. Basically I was working on the Mala Noche book.<br \/>\n<strong><em><br \/>\nBruno wrote that you came to Chiapas to find yourself again,<br \/>\nto look for another impulse.<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Yes, because my story in Marseille was starting to break up\u2026<br \/>\nSo did you find the camera as the\u2026 No the trip in Chiapas was awful. I loved the Zapatista movement. Photographically it was very very bad but I guess I was just starting to think again about photography, so I didn\u2019t get any pictures out of this trip. I was just starting to think about it again.<br \/>\n<strong><em><br \/>\nDid New York change your perception of photography, if you compare it to the time<br \/>\nwhen you followed your friend and the time after the ICP?<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>In NY I was starting to get paid to assist some photographers but I was getting so bored\u2026 it\u2019s not my world at all. I never changed. I was photographing then, exactly the same way I do now, except now I\u2019m a bit more self-conscious, so I photograph less because I\u2026 I don\u2019t know how to explain, maybe I was more naive but it was exactly the same way and doing exactly the same things in the same place and with the same people, there\u2019s no change at all. Yes, I have changed in what I am looking for. In the very beginning I guess I was just looking to move on and afterwards maybe even more for sex.<br \/>\n<strong><em><br \/>\nWhat is it that keeps drawing you back to the night?<br \/>\nWhat are the questions there?<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Well, I don\u2019t believe in photography as an art or a job or anything. I think of photography as a language and I think a language should be used to speak, to say what you have to say. So, the only things I have to say about my life and what I know about the world, is the way I see it. So it\u2019s not about photography. I spent fifteen years of my life, more actually, twenty years of my life in the streets well before photography, so the only thing I can and I should speak about is that\u2026I think people should just use photography to say things and not just photography for the sake of photography, you know. I see so many photographers, now I do quite a few workshops in these days, the world is full of talented photographers. The problem is just so many of them just don\u2019t know what to say, they think life is one thing and photography is another but they don\u2019t realise that photography is just a way to reflect what you are. I don\u2019t think I will ever change. Maybe I will evolve in my own way but when I talk about these things I have no other interest.<br \/>\n<strong><em><br \/>\nWhat would you like to say?\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I have no statement to make. The world I know is different from the one I can see on TV or in photo books or\u2026 I just want to defend my vision of the world. I guess it is the reason I started with photography in the first place. The outside world or the real world is so different from the world I knew.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><strong>I just want this world to exist.\u00a0Is this connected to drinking? Is the world you see with<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>alcohol the same as without?<\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I see the world the same way when I drink but maybe drinking can make you withdrawn. I was always like this, in the ten years I spent without photography, which was really some kind of black hole, you know, I never spoke to anybody. I see alcohol just like the key to go further, the things I wouldn\u2019t dare doing if I was sober and yes, it\u2019s true, because I only work when I\u2019m drinking; and if I do anything very good, that is when I\u2019m really out of my mind, when I reach unconsciousness. It\u2019s just the way to break the limits down. It\u2019s just the way I am before photographing. I\u2019m really schizophrenic, in that when I don\u2019t drink I\u2019m completely closed within myself and will not speak to anybody and when I drink I just speak to everybody and break things down. It\u2019s more than a key; it\u2019s just like a switch, you know, switch on and switch off.<br \/>\n<strong><em><br \/>\nDo you believe that there is a subjective language\u00a0in photography? Is it possible to communicate from a person to an outer world with photography\u00a0as a subjective document? Do you communicate through your images?<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I think it can only be; I believe some French writers who think that people only communicate through their intimate wounds. Only human beings communicate through their intimate wounds and to me this is what photography is about, it\u2019s about describing the world. One always learns things from photography, a different way of looking at the world. I\u2019m not sure it is the only way to use photography, I don\u2019t know if it should be. I\u2019m not sure, but the way I see photography, the only things you can tell are interesting as long as they\u2019ve been lived, in some way, somehow\u2026 and for me photography cannot just be an intellectual game. I\u2019m trying to write about these things now; it\u2019s difficult to talk about it.<br \/>\n<strong><em><br \/>\nDo you believe that there is another photographic language to come? Provoke \u201968 in Japan,\u00a0Daido Moriyama and Europe now. Is there another philosophy to come, which will break\u00a0the tendencies and schools such as D\u00fcsseldorf, Yale, etc.?<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I don\u2019t really think in terms of schools. Sometimes I hear specific voices whose words make sense to me. Moriyama\u2019s, Anders\u2019, Nan\u2019s voice, I recognise. I met Daido in Japan last year and he was telling me about his way of photographing, just trying to reconstruct some strange unresolved puzzle, a task he will never come to terms with. He was also telling me how he relates to reality, using the words contamination, germs, amoebae, speaking as if photography and life were just a matter of diseases. As a photographer, he gets infected by the outside and keeps going with an endless energy, just feeding himself with fragments of energy. I can understand this way of thinking and acting. I hear what he says, but I don\u2019t think of his photography as an example of the Japanese school of photography. There are just individuals, more or less talented and more or less honest. But in these years in Japan, it\u2019 s true there was a real flow of beauty from Daido to Fucase, Nakahira, Araki and so many others, maybe because it was a time when photographers looked for their own styles and were something else other than copycats and clones.<br \/>\n<strong><em><br \/>\nWhat is Photography?<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div><em>\u201cPhotography is something that<br \/>\ngives shape to all my desires. And it is a fossil of time and light.<br \/>\nI gave many definitions of photography in the past. I have a lot of feelings for it, but at this stage, photography is that.<br \/>\nAnd from the days when I was in my twenties until today \u2013 I\u2019m in my sixties now -, photography has always been that same thing\u2026\u201d\u00a0<\/em><\/div>\n<div>Daido Moriyama interviewed by Antoine d\u2019Agata<\/div>\n<div><em><br \/>\n\u201c\u2026Photography is first of all born from an egoistic environment. Envy, possession, jealousy are the most important human emotions because they come from inevitable real life\u2026\u201d \u2013<\/em>Daido Moriyama<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><strong><em>But they made something happen which influenced the next generation\u2026\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I know, Anders always loved Moriyama\u2019s work, and Moriyama was really influenced by William Klein. I got to know Anders\u2019 work from Nan Goldin. Obviously you always influence somebody and your way of speaking always changes the way people see the world. This is why people do it. I do hope someday I change the way people see the world. This might sound a bit big but it\u2019s very small, it\u2019s just by changing the perception of people. You do change and I think it would be useless without this.<br \/>\n<strong><em><br \/>\nThe academic world, critics, certain schools where you have<br \/>\nnames and writers, how does this world look like in the future?\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I think one can always look for the historical context. I saw quite a few very young photographers in the north. Northern countries like Sweden or Finland. I think they are very good in making spectacular, strong and beautiful images. Then I see somebody like Anders where his photography today is very different to what it was ten years ago and today he is sixty years old and making big changes. It is hard work to just go always a bit beyond the conventional and not to be in the photographic, the beautiful, the spectacular and the efficient, but just to go closer to yourself. This guy, he is sixty years old and he is expending some beautiful energy in doing just this, beyond the tendencies or the schools or the generations\u2026 I like the idea that people push their lives forward, trying to develop their own lives.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><strong><em>Is there a global language of subjective photography?<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>It\u2019s not subjective\u2026or objective, I just get so bored. Sometimes I see some beautiful images by German photographers and I\u2019m really impressed by the beauty. There are many qualities, I just don\u2019t know. I just find concept boring. A fake situation, or putting make-up on a girl or asking somebody to take his clothes off and finding some spectacular way of showing this person. I get very bored with concept\u2026<br \/>\n<strong><em><br \/>\nWhy does concept exist?<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I think concept is a very useful thing. I think of myself as a concept photographer. Ten years ago I told people that my piece was my life and I was making art with my life, ten years before taking pictures. I was always pretty clear and I think it is a very conscious way. We need concept to know where we\u2019re going but concept shouldn\u2019t be left alone as a subject matter, a tool, a form. It should be just one of the elements. I think we live in a world which\u2026we just need a spectacle, that can make spectacles out of anything that is not disturbing for the social function.<br \/>\n<strong><em><br \/>\nTimeless photography; when does the picture become timeless?<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I\u2019m afraid I have a boring answer for this. For me it doesn\u2019t depend on the aesthetic qualities, which you reach at some point out of some magical mystery. I guess only the form has to follow. Why do we mix it up? For me it is how far somebody goes. I\u2019m trying to think why today I like William Klein\u2019s pictures from NY I get very bored by Minor White or\u2026 it\u2019s just that I can feel the essence of the person you know, and Brassai, I think, I\u2019m not so crazy about the night pictures or about the prostitute shots, but yes, I love to look at how the world was then. For me what is very beautiful in his work is the graffiti work, and I can see, they are very simple pictures you know, they are timeless to me today, I guess, by the purity of how far and how purely he worked at one point The same with Walker Evans, I get bored by his most beautiful work but I love his last polaroids. Timelessness is inversely proportional to the simplicity of the moment, of the smallness of the moment and when it just becomes a very tiny moment. When such a thing, a string of life, when the surface becomes so thin you can never touch what is beyond or behind, but you can just like, get a sense of it.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><strong><em>What do you think of the pictures of Lehmitz?<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The Lehmitz caf\u00e9\u2026 in almost every one of the pictures Anders shows himself and these people and their lives getting nowhere and he always shows\u2026 the people themselves are almost on the edge of nothing. This is what makes them timeless to me.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><strong>Could you compare yourself to Anders?<\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>To me this book, Caf\u00e9 Lehmitz, was a big shock and a big, big influence on my photographic world\u2026<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><strong><em>What is a self-portrait?<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>There are different answers. The usual self-portraits are not so different from other pictures. Except, I myself don\u2019t do them. People around me take the camera and I become a part of this fictional world. In the way that I\u2019m just a character in my world, like the other characters also are. I don\u2019t think I have the answer, it was the same when I made this book, Vortex, it was more like a reaction. Why? It\u2019s obvious, all work is a self-portrait, I don\u2019t have to separate it. Self-portrait should be included in the rest of the work and many times people don\u2019t even know it\u2019s me in the picture: why do I need to do this? I was tired of people not understanding the work and this was making the point. We are speaking here about my life.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><strong><em>What was the motivation for you to make a self-portrait?<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Well, these days I like self-portraiture because I\u2019m fighting with my character in the books. It\u2019s very strange when you work with your own life because you never know where you stand. You become very schizophrenic and you don\u2019t even know if you just document your life, or if you live your life to have some material to work with, you know? So, suddenly you very easily lose control of where you stand in the picture\u2026 and in this picture, this guy is fading in a way, and for once it\u2019s not me who\u2019s fading, it\u2019s him\u2026 all these things. Basically, every image should be a self-portrait. I don\u2019t see why anybody should photograph anything but himself.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><strong><em>Do you ever go through your rawmaterial and think of who you were then?<\/em><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>I did this for the show at the Galerie VU and it was very depressing, depressing because I\u2019m a bad photographer. I don\u2019t work very much so I always have the feeling that there is so much more happening than what\u2019s left in the pictures\u2026 but I live with it. I know that this year was very important for me and again there is not so much, I don\u2019t have much to show for it. But if I am faithful to what I believe in, then this is not really important you know. Probably the most intense and innocent part of my life was before I started photography. Photography helped me to go further, I should probably have started fifteen years earlier.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<blockquote>\n<div>\u201cI try to establish a state of nomadic worlds, partial and personal, systematic and instinctual, of physical spaces and emotions where I am fully an actor. I avoid defining beforehand, what I am about to photograph. The shots are taken randomly, according to chance meetings and circumstances. The choices made, considering all the possibilities, are subconscious. But the obsessions remain constant: the streets, fear, obscurity, and the sexual act\u2026. Not to mention perhaps, in the end, the simple desire to exist.\u201d-Antoine D\u2019agata<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>****************************************************************************************************<\/p>\n<div>\n<header>\n<h1>ASX INTERVIEWS ANTOINE D\u2019AGATA \u2013 \u201cA Simple Desire to Exist\u201d (2014)<\/h1>\n<div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><strong><i>A conversation with Raphael Shammaa,.Translated from French.<\/i><\/strong><\/div>\n<div><strong>New York, February 7, 2014<\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Original Link:\u00a0http:\/\/www.americansuburbx.com\/2014\/03\/asx-interviews-antoine-dagata-simple-desire-exist-2014.html<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040im_\/http:\/\/www.americansuburbx.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Antoine_DAgata.215-Custom.jpg\" alt=\"Antoine_D'Agata.215 (Custom)\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" \/><\/p>\n<p>@ Antoine d\u2019Agata, Courtesy Magnum Photos and International Center of Photography<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><b>Raphael Shammaa \u2013<\/b>\u00a0How do you feel discussing your work and being asked a lot of personal questions? You must have known from the start that, due to the nature of your images, people would be curious about a lot of things.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine D\u2019Agata \u2013<\/b>\u00a0My images are first and foremost meant to \u201ccontaminate\u201d photography as we know it and accept it, \u201cperverting\u201d and undermining pre-formatted assumptions surrounding and supporting the insidious ideology of a culture made out of conventions.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Explaining my work is not a burden to me ; rather it is an opportunity to fulfill an obligation which is to be accountable for my work, to stand by it and affirm its object \u2013 which I write at length and pointedly about in \u201cANTICORPS\u201d (Antibody). It\u2019s a theory that is both spontaneous and instinctive, a relentless practice born from personal experience, an experiment through excess, a political questioning about what photography is not and ought be about, in precise and, most of all, concrete terms.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Do you share your work with anyone before showing it to galleries?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<p><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0No, mine is an entirely solitary pursuit as most of my time is being spent on the road, on the streets and in hotel rooms in anonymous cities. I invest whatever energy I have left into a perpetual and hopeless search for ever new experiences and encounters.And while the camera is always present, I try to give up technical and aesthetic control of it and focus on existential considerations at hand. At the moment of shooting, I put it all out of my mind, focusing as much as I can on the physical experience.For instance, I worked for years with the Nicephore Niepce Museum in France and kept mailing unprocessed rolls of film to them. They ended up processing, digitizing and archiving some 1,600 rolls and contact sheets \u2013 none of which I was getting to see except once a year. There is a real obstinacy, a necessity for me to just forget, and even deny, the existence of the photographic dimension just to emphasize the experiential aspect of the pursuit.The important point to focus on though, is the photographer\u2019s intimate relationship to the world, his stance and involvement in the situations he documents \u2013 on the physical, political, moral and aesthetics levels. By his active participation in whichever circumstance he evolves in, the photographer takes personal responsibility and then makes his responsibility total. Instead of the subject\u2019s, it is the the photographer\u2019s movements, perspective and experience that are being depicted in any given picture.<\/p>\n<p><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Why bother with photography at all then?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0A good question, and one I don\u2019t have a final answer for; I\u2019ve tried answering it for years and don\u2019t believe there\u2019s a way of making sense out of that contradiction, but I\u2019ll never stop trying. I have forever sought to establish an impossible balance between living fully every moment \u2013 which, in the end is my sole ambition \u2013 meaning being at the core of my own existence, whatever the risks, to live my life as fully and intensely as I can in a manner that is as true to my instinct and as politically pertinent as possible and, at the same time, keep documenting it through photography. I feel it\u2019s important not to give up on it, however absurd or pointless it may all seem.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>There are additional aspects to photography, the most basic of which being that it provides me with the energy needed to live my existence to its fullest, sometimes beyond my own control or judgement. That\u2019s how I convince and push myself every day to destroy what I\u2019ve achieved and start again from scratch and place myself once more into an intimate relationship with fear, darkness, and the void. Without photography I would probably fall into the worst yet most commonly adopted choice \u2013 moral and physical comfort.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0\u2026how does photography do that for you, prod you onto your chosen path?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Existence is about the unceasing search for an intensity-packed life \u2013 a sort of recurring, never ending, forward-moving fleeing, ever looking for loss of equilibrium or a plunge into the void, for self-destruction, self-exploitation. It\u2019s a formless, ever ongoing tragedy where everything ends up being used up.Photography allows me to be alive, to face the absence of meaning surrounding us, and to give this tragedy form, a form that\u2019s tangible, real and which can be shared\u00a0 \u2013 and that\u2019s important. It makes it possible for me to fashion a space in which I can simultaneously engage in self-destruction and in the fanatical pursuit of life, while providing a document that, without providing any explanations, bestows shape to these experiences and allows the exploration of their realness, of the various forms they take and their meaning. And of their import.<\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0And of course, you are aware that photography is incapable of conveying what really, really goes on.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013\u00a0<\/b>Of course, of course. My aim is not to provide answers. But all these questions we ask \u2013 that some of us ask and others choose not to consider, are my responsibility, and duty, to keep on putting forward and to keep seeking answers for \u2013 meaning, to keep diving into the void and exploring the darkness \u2013 not in the hope of understanding it all or of attaining anything in particular, but in order not to give up on the exploration. It\u2019s not a matter of explaining or solving anything about darkness itself, it\u2019s a matter of dignity, of being honest when facing my own rage, my own desire, my own fear, not giving in or giving up, and of keeping it up every day, being an actor in my own life and in society, refusing to be a scared and passive\u00a0 consumer.<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040im_\/http:\/\/www.americansuburbx.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Antoine_DAgata.228-Custom.jpg\" alt=\"Antoine_D'Agata.228 (Custom)\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" \/><\/p>\n<p>@ Antoine d\u2019Agata, Courtesy Magnum Photos and International Center of Photography<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0But dignity, isn\u2019t it a concept after all? Isn\u2019t its meaning dependent on each individual?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0For me it\u2019s not a concept, dignity is real, tangible, evident; I see it in the everyday gestures and attitudes of those who are left bare, in that world in which the have-nothings live in a state of strict destitution to which they find themselves relegated.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0And that state is what\u2019s left after everything has been taken away from them?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<p><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Exactly. They find themselves where they are because they have been denied, stripped of everything. Not there out of choice. And when someone is left with nothing that\u2019s what they must exist from. They find ways to exist, no matter how unpalatable, unacceptable, cruel, immoral or brutal. And it is in that particular context, after these people have been stripped bare and humiliated that I detect dignity in its purest form \u2013 when their own naked flesh is the only remaining asset, when surviving boils down to fulfilling the most desperate of desires, when nothing is left to lose and when, through the intensities of lust and crime humanity can finally be regained.In the everyday world, a world which affords comforts, encourages fear and supports silence, lies, hypocrisy, cynicism and laziness, people protect themselves to the point of\u00a0numbness,ending up lifeless.Photography affords me access to the world of darkness where it is possible for me to feel and exist,\u00a0 where other people also exist \u2013 albeit under tragic circumstances, in pain and in adversity, but where they nevertheless do exist, sharing their own brand of love, of solidarity and compassion.But in that other, polite daylight world, all I find is lies and indifference.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Is it lies or amnesia?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Both. Amnesia is the result of lying to one\u2019s self. Lies and comfort are essentially tied.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0You are well-known today and the public responds positively to your work. The other night at International Center of Photography\/ICP everyone applauded your presentation. Let me ask you, how did people react to your work at first, before you were known?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Their reaction, I think, is complex because I make an effort to present truth in some acceptable form, through images whose forms are emotionally recognizable and identifiable, and some that can at times even be seductive or enhanced via their own intrinsic beauty\u2026 I do it to draw the viewer in, to lure him into his own forgotten rage, his own hunger\u2026Whereas other, cruder, more brutal images with poor lighting which do convey the same intensity, the same beauty and pack the same\u00a0 compassion or tenderness, these remain inaccessible to the public. All they see is the flesh. So there is repulsion at times, because of the poverty and violence depicted.<\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Why would they applaud then?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0My images are not violent images. They are somewhat abstract. They show pain, fear, desire; they speak of things known to all. They are less violent or explicit than what\u2019s in the media.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013\u00a0<\/b>Are they more abstract or more taboo?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<p><b>Antoine \u2013\u00a0<\/b>Francis Bacon said something to the effect that his work was not about violence but about our horror in the face of it.My images are charged with the full range of what we can feel, understand, experience, which is more emotional, more abstract and existential than violence itself. In the course of my life I have witnessed people having intercourse with animals, people dying, people shedding tears mixed with blood \u2026 none of that is in my work. All I show is desire and fear, both of which are part of tasting life to its last, provided one has the fortitude for it.Desire and fear go hand-in-hand. Desire without fear is about unchecked consumerism, about unbridled pleasure seeking and constant thirsting for gratification. Fear without desire, on the other hand, stands for power \u2013 political, economic, and for comfort, tied to our fear of existing, of being, our fear of rebelling against established values.Desire and fear working together pave the way to understanding one\u2019s limits and to learn how to opt in favor of desire. It\u2019s about linking enjoyment to thought. I don\u2019t, therefore have any reason to renounce either desire nor fear.<\/p>\n<p>I want to keep on walking the streets of large cities at night, moving towards whatever or whoever is moving towards me, and fear is critical to this process, and so is desire. I want to exist, to gorge myself \u2013 I do not want to give up any of it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0How does your career as a photographer play into all of this?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0My practice is entirely dedicated to servicing my beingness, making it possible for me to afford moving around, going back and forth. it\u2019s my only luxury and my only tangible asset \u2013 I\u2019ve lived without a fixed residence or personal possessions for 10 years, claiming freedom of movement as my only form of affluence: I get all that through photography. So it\u2019s a sort of compromise \u2013 to be kept under control \u2026<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0What is the compromise being made?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Making prints, signing prints, exchanging them for money \u2026<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Transacting \u2026.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Yes, operating in a marketplace which lacks legitimacy, which is vain, meaningless and of no interest to me, but which I have to deal with \u2026 and make a living from \u2026 so, I deal with the art world \u2013 a world I have no regard for but from which I get everything I need to keep going. I take what I need from it and feed on the frustration and the anger of being denied total freedom.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Does that in a way compel you to accept reality as it is?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\u00a0<b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Yes and no, the compromises I submit to are truly minimal. Once in a while I am asked to sign a piece of paper which results in great freedom of movement with deep repercussions on my existence. Teaching too is a compromise, but a compromise with benefits as well.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0These are compromises in the sense that you are asked to engage into something that is not of primary importance to you.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Precisely. But having taught some 1,100 students in the past 10 years, there is something taking place on the order of transmission, of ideological communication, of \u201ccontamination\u201d \u2013 a word I am really attached to.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0And that really matters to you.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Yes, it is the primary purpose of my work \u2013 \u201ccontaminating\u201d that conventional sense of propriety, that sense of doing the\u00a0 photographically appropriate thing. I work within the system and, simultaneously, against it, reminding young people they can be actors in their own lives instead of witnesses, striking blows as surgically precise as I am able to,\u00a0 blows against the logics of production, of profitability, of normalcy \u2026<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0To what end?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<p><b>Antoine \u2013\u00a0<\/b>To get photography back to its true purpose. Photography has been reduced to a state of shallowness and emptiness, of pettiness I would say, resulting from practices focused on discovering new formal aspects and inventing personal and original ways to look at reality \u2013 culminating in works that are trivial, useless, futile \u2013 new versions of reality, sort of.My object then is to get photography back to requiring true commitment, to being a language that is unique by its potential subtlety and rawness \u2026 a language resulting from personal experience, the product of situations the author finds himself in; so that photography is not a way to look at the world, but a way to live the world, to take position, to be of the world, in such a way that everything stands for something \u2013 distance, movement \u2026 so that photography is an entirely physically related art, purely existential, anchored in reality\u2026which is what I strive to explain and push for. It is that characteristic, unique to photography\u00a0 \u2013 to the exclusion of all other forms of art, which connects it to life itself, makes it a tangible presence. The photographer is then accountable not for his images, but for his acts.That\u2019s what I\u2019ve done with my work by making sure I enter the image, by being present within the image physically as well as through my actions \u2026 my actions and my images becoming inextricably fused, which is something that runs counter to everything that\u2019s been done in photography from its very early beginnings.Photography has been shackled by rules governing style, composition, lighting \u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0I\u2019ve heard you use the term \u201cart\u201d sometimes with disdain and at other times with conviction, intimating the word carries multiple connotations for you.<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040im_\/http:\/\/www.americansuburbx.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Antoine_DAgata.508-Custom.jpg\" alt=\"Antoine_D'Agata.508 (Custom)\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" \/><\/p>\n<p>@ Antoine d\u2019Agata, Courtesy Magnum Photos and International Center of Photography<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013\u00a0<\/b>I use it with conviction when I bring it back to its most primitive meaning and function: art as language, as a simple way to express something where words alone fail \u2026 something about being, existing, surviving. When I refer to photography as an institution, as an economy hinging on accepted norms, on arrangements resulting from laziness and greed \u2026 that\u2019s when I speak of it as being trite.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0So then, how does it feel when you\u2019re referred to as an artist, since that\u2019s the manner in which you are being perceived?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0At this juncture, I ignore which part of me, or of my work people accept or reject. I cannot afford the luxury of taking note of what people think. I need to live within the realm of my own thinking and of my own actions, and not allow myself to be distracted by either rejection nor apologia because of their weakening effects upon me. My allegiance lies elsewhere.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013\u00a0<\/b>I\u2019d like to talk about something of particular interest which is that, some time after the death of your photographer friend, you espoused photography to help restore structure to your life. You also fathered two children with your deceased friend\u2019s wife.In the end, your friend\u2019s death changed your life in two significant ways. And the question that comes to mind is whether you sometimes ponder the impact that single event has had on your life.<\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013\u00a0<\/b>Beyond that one friend, it is to my whole generation that I feel accountable. I live in constant remembrance of and respect for my generation, a generation I pay homage to, a generation that was decimated by the AIDS epidemic \u2013 and as expected, it was the wildest and the most dashing among us that went first; and I\u2019ve always harbored a sense of guilt and shame for having survived them \u2026 and I believe that somewhere within my desire to constantly outdo myself and push further into risky territory there\u2019s something that has to do with trying to live up to all these friendships that were swallowed up by disease; and a dedication to remaining faithful to their memory.<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>As these young men were dying from the effects of sex and drugs, a compulsive frenzy fueled by the extreme lifestyle of the street arose among survivors to keep living, to keep existing, driving us deeper and deeper into extreme behaviors, into more and more sex, more and more drugs. We needed to feel alive.<\/p>\n<p>And I desperately strive to exist, even today, and fight; because, for me, there is no choice other than going on feeling, going on surviving the economic brutality of the world and feeding my own fears and desires \u2026 My present strategy is identical to what it was thirty years ago, I am sorry to say \u2013 meaning, I still cling to living a solitary life.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013\u00a0<\/b>Yet today, as opposed to thirty years ago, you have access to a megaphone.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Of course. And I use it in the most relevant and appropriate way I can.But the substratum remains the same. When I refer to desire and fear I refer to some of the\u00a0 dangerous places that I keep going to, where people engage in the most extreme, brutal and insane behaviors. I do it to live and share with these women some of the most beautiful moments and most solid friendships ever, in utmost truthfulness and accomplice-ship.And that\u2019s what I tried to achieve in my latest, just completed, 2-hour video in which I recorded 24 women I\u2019ve known intimately and photographed, each speaking in her own native language, a video which was translated and edited later on.<\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Which languages were these?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013\u00a0<\/b>It\u2019s a random mix of Khmer, Japanese, Russian, Norwegian, Georgian, \u2026.. these women having a limited capacity to communicate in English.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0At ICP, referring to your children, you said: they mean everything to me. You seemed emotional as you spoke the words. Were you in fact emotional?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013\u00a0<\/b>My four children have a hold on me; they are the only individuals towards whom I feel responsible.My other responsibilities are conditional, limited; they lie apart from friendship, philosophy or ideology; or aesthetics. My 4 daughters though, I feel accountable to. I owe them my presence \u2013 I owe them being alive and being available to them. It is because of them that I obligate myself to stay alive.I am grateful for that aspect of things, and yet it remains a complex matter because when I get to that place where I get the sense that I am nearing something wild, extreme, brutal \u2013 a certain level of truth and madness, I feel the brakes being applied, I feel being pulled back from the brink. I owe my children the necessity I\u2019ve imposed upon myself to be fearless and, at the same time, to try staying alive \u2026 So it\u2019s complicated but \u2026 beautiful. It may even be love!<\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0A wise man once said: what the mind invents the mind destroys; the real is not invented and cannot be destroyed.<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>In the course of your life you have seen any number of things and people destroyed. What has endured throughout? What do you consider to be real, true? What cannot and will never be destroyed?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0For me, what is indestructible is Greatness, Tragedy, Beauty, Destiny.<\/div>\n<div>\n<p>These smashed, shipwrecked destinies, humanity destroyed \u2026 these men and women crushed under the weight and violence of the economic machinery \u2026 of course bodies have been destroyed and names forgotten \u2026 still, what remains is the majesty of such destinies.<\/p>\n<p>Earlier we talked about destitute people who rise to the level of their destitution and live their lives as full humans \u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Is that what you feel dignity stands for?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<p><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Yes. Dignity is about dealing with destiny at its own level, without answers, without escape routes, all the while accepting the inherent violence and the greatness of it all. This dignity is the by-product of our limitations and ignorance, both properly ours.I am an atheist\u00a0 and believe in nothing outside of dust. All else and, yes, art \u2013 in its accepted forms, is a mind invention, a play with mirrors, while my own photography \u2013 or rather the experience related to it, remains indestructible and true.My book Anticorps \u2013 along with my determination to destroy trivial art, restores art to its legitimate purpose. My images portray live experiences of pain or pleasure, real sweat, actual sperm and real blood.Women whose still images were shown last night at ICP having sex are in fact enjoying orgasm \u2013 while dying from AIDS because they, their condition and their desperate financial situation are denied recognition. And that\u2019s what it\u2019s really about \u2013 not about fussing over a photographic image\u2019s controlled blur or grain size.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0You characterize the taking of your daytime pictures of damaged and scarred buildings as dissociated exercises, as opposed to your nighttime work which you describe as personal and intimate.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013\u00a0<\/b>I am equally invested when taking these images as I am with my nighttime images, the difference being that for my daytime images I strive to use logic, discernment, clarity.I also make it a point to photograph those places and situations which inspire repulsion or horror in me. I take pictures of war \u2026 I try to understand, I visit factories, densely populated institutional buildings \u2013 all the things I find ugly, brutal, violent \u2013 the sort of violence I don\u2019t identify with, that is foreign to me, that comes from greed, in order to get closer, to better see, to better understand how to survive this violence and in order make a statement about my belief regarding this sort of world \u2013 even though it doesn\u2019t come naturally to me to do it, and yet it is my duty to go on doing it.<\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0And you discharge this duty conscientiously.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013\u00a0<\/b>Yes, conscientiously. Because it concerns that aspect of violence which is political, institutional, economic \u2013 which I fight against, a sort of violence different from than the one found in my world of darkness. And to do so I need to get closer, to know it better and face its brutality.And then there is the violence in my world of darkness \u2013 even more brutal \u2013 inadmissible in many ways, yet unavoidable and which exists in reaction to institutionalized violence. This second form is part of me and I am part of it. It is a mix\u00a0 of humanity and horror and hopelessness. It is at once tragic, magnificent, unbearable.\u00a0 It\u2019s the world I grew up in, lived in, and continue to live in. I defend this violence that exists on the margins and this type of social deviance; I defend it against all types of social norms \u2026 because I need that space for freedom and to go on living; I\u2019ll fight for it to the bitter end.I am unable to go on living without this form of violence; it\u2019s about everything that keeps me alive.<\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0In other words, the lifestyle you lead both stirs and quenches these two basic needs of yours, desire and fear.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Exactly. That\u2019s the only way to put it since that interplay between desire and fear accurately reflects my attempt to live my destiny as a human being at its fullest.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013\u00a0<\/b>Which has the stronger pull on you, art in the way you engage in it, or the freedom afforded through drugs? You keep toggling between the two. Which would you be ready to give up just to have the other?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0For me, the two have become undistinguishable from one another.To actually enjoy and thoroughly partake in this type of freedom \u2013 this freedom that opens up for me through my choice of a particular lifestyle and through chemical use, the access to lawless environments, to spaces on the margins of any rules or controls, to live it fully \u2013 both sensibly and foolishly, I need the discipline and the language derived through art in order to give shape and form to it all.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040im_\/http:\/\/www.americansuburbx.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Antoine_DAgata.534-Custom.jpg\" alt=\"Antoine_D'Agata.534 (Custom)\" width=\"800\" height=\"600\" \/><\/p>\n<p>@ Antoine d\u2019Agata, Courtesy Magnum Photos and International Center of Photography<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Without either one of them I would already be dead, destroyed, totally used up. Art imposes its discipline on me. In Anticorps I refer to photography as a form of martial art hinging on desire, yet requiring discipline, rigor and a strategy for pushing the envelope as far as can humanly be managed. So strategy is a factor.My daily experience is the product of a nefarious blend of discipline and madness.<\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Ying and Yang rule the roost\u00a0 \u2026<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Yes, exactly. That\u2019s what accounts for the richness of the experience. Enjoyment is everywhere you look in society, enjoyment allied to hope, to fear. Enjoyment bereft of fear stands for television watching, for pornography, consumerism \u2026<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0You refer to fear \u2026 what is fear for you?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Fear is involved when contemplating being nothing and inching ever closer to our own death. Fear is what holds us back and prevents most of us from taking necessary yet inadmissible risks; forcing most men to give up their right to skepticism, their dignity, their courage as they lapse\u00a0 into a life of illusion, of abnegation, of obliviousness.It\u2019s never a matter of understanding death; it\u2019s about rising to the challenge of our own death by living side-by-side with it incessantly, right up against it every day. It\u2019s about opening to the experience of living at such tight\u00a0 proximity to our own death.<\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0How do you represent existence?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0It\u2019s everything we\u2019ve already talked about, or even less \u2026<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Regarding your professional practice \u2013 a practice which affords you a certain type of freedom, do you think the public will eventually look for a different type of work from you?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0My task is too difficult, too insane, too obsessive to allow me to consider doing anything else. My only option is to persist and go beyond my own limits. On the other hand, it is up to either viewers of my work or photographers, to review, question and reconsider their own expectations and viewpoints. It\u2019s not for me to reconsider my intimate choices about existence, I can only try to live up to my own choices, and hope others will pick up the torch, take the risks and follow their own paths.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013\u00a0<\/b>It\u2019s all up to them, then?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0That\u2019s where \u201ccontamination\u201d, mentioned earlier, comes in. I am sensing definite frustration among younger artists and photographers, a yearning for clear-sightedness, a growing rejection of all types of lies which constitute the core of contemporary art: puritanism, cynism, glitter, phoniness, frivolity, greed \u2026\u00a0 but that may be too optimistic \u2026 art should not be saved\u2026<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0And what happens to those who become contaminated?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0They will attempt to experience the desire to exist, to live.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Do you know of some who have become contaminated?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Yes \u2026 the problem is that those that come to mind have been getting lost, some are no longer around or gave up trying \u2026 death, failure, madness \u2026 It\u2019s a perilous, impossible path \u2026 one has to accept living along those lines \u2026.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Those who awaken to that type of reality \u2026<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0\u2026 their pain will deepen, their daily lives will change for the worse. Their mind, nerves, organs will fail, their flesh will fall apart. These situations are untenable. Living more fully intensifies reality.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0A man is born, struggles his whole life to express his deepest reality, and then is shown the door. It\u2019s the same scenario for everyone. What do you think of this scenario?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Our only choice is living head held high without slowing the pace or looking away.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0So we keep walking towards the edge of the cliff without slowing the pace, fully awake, aware of what\u2019s coming, head held high.What happens next?<\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0The fullest possible experience of the void \u2026 the ecstasy of being alive, fearing death yet playing with it \u2026 there\u2019s dignity in such a choice of destiny, as horrific and inadmissible as it may be, as absurd as it may be \u2026 there is beauty in it, the allure of the absurd. Making the most out of nothingness, and not giving up, whatever the price\u2026<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013<\/b>\u00a0Is there logic to all this?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013<\/b>\u00a0There can\u2019t be. We don\u2019t know anything.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Raphael \u2013\u00a0<\/b>Is this absence of logic intended?<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><b>Antoine \u2013 \u2026t<\/b>hat\u2019s a trick question \u2026.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<p>Antoine d\u2019Agata presented his work at ICP as part of their\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040\/http:\/\/www.icp.org\/events\/2014\/february\/05\/icp-lecture-series-antoine-dagata\">Lecture Series on February 5, 2014.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>**************************************************************************************<\/div>\n<div>\u00a0ANTOINE D\u2019AGATA: \u201cEmpty Shell Walking\u201d (2009)<\/div>\n<div><strong>By Doug Rickard, for ASX, March 2009<\/strong><\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>Original Link:\u00a0http:\/\/www.americansuburbx.com\/2009\/03\/antoine-dagata-is-empty-shell-walking.html<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<div><a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040\/http:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/115614.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040im_\/http:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/115614.jpg\" alt=\"115614\" width=\"625\" height=\"409\" \/><\/a><br \/>\nBy\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040\/http:\/\/www.dougrickard.com\/\">Doug Rickard<\/a>It would seem that\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040\/http:\/\/www.magnumphotos.com\/Archive\/C.aspx?VP=XSpecific_MAG.PhotographerDetail_VPage&amp;pid=2K7O3R14QKXR&amp;nm=Antoine%20D%27Agata\">Antoine D\u2019Agata<\/a>\u00a0is an empty shell walking, a living thing yes, a tortured adventuring heartbeat, yes\u2026 perhaps a sort of hybrid man-beast animal behind glass\u2026 one that seeks, that follows its urges and never finds satisfaction. The taste for more is potent, the drive inside is ongoing, he keeps going to find more. The vice appears to own him, the urge appearing to torment him, but fullness never comes, only flavored food, feeding him for a moment and then quickly the taste fades\u2026 the empty always wins. At times, he thinks that he has found something to satisfy for good and then once it is in the mouth, it quickly becomes nothing\u2026 just ashes evaporating memory.And just what does this empty, driven, prostitute fueled-livin evaporating taste look like? If you step into an inferno, if you willingly give up the foundations and step off the cliff, into the vortex\u2026 if you seek something that will never satisfy, if you f-k to spite love, if you feed your demons and spin without control, when you have nothing to fill you up\u2026 when you live inside of the drug, what does that look like? From outside in, from inside out, twist together the inside and make it the out\u2026 morph the empty into something palpable, mix in the shell of the man\u2026 the flesh of the used\u2026 wrap it in a cloak of love-lessness and self inflicted psychological wounds\u2026 give your inferno the fuel that it needs to keep burning you alive, to keep sucking you in\u2026 then step back and look at the page. This is Antoine and his beautiful photographs.<\/div>\n<div><a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040\/http:\/\/i1.wp.com\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/-3KYgRi9FW2c\/Td5mMY9m03I\/AAAAAAAAOws\/UTcEew9piZQ\/s1600\/insomnia_011%2B%2528Custom%2529.jpg\" rel=\"gallery\"><br \/>\n<\/a>Look at the muck, at the tar\u2026 at the black, at the ash, at the junk in his head\u2026 I think that I can see inside of his mind, but I can\u2019t\u2026 I can only see the evidence, I can only see the art. I can see the mind as a print, as a pixel. Does the work reflect the man? Does the man reflect the work? Does the man serve as a symbol for the work or does the work serve as a symbol for the man? Who is leading who? Who tells the truth, who is the liar? Either way, it is beautiful. The art\u2026 some ticket to ride, in the hands of a man like Antoine, beauty cannot help but come.Is it a pit of pain or is it bliss? In this darkness of a man who has embraced his urges, who chooses the \u201cwrong\u201d path, in a man that has given himself over to his drives and let himself go, can he find peace? Beauty has somehow come, a beauty from the black, power in the putrid, flesh as a flower, perhaps even a dead little flower still seeking the light \u2013 not yet gone, but decaying.As human beings, we can\u00a0relish\u00a0in the\u00a0gift\u00a0that is art. Oh how we can treasure this ability to enjoy the pit of the empty or the apparent joy of a temporarily fulfilled heart.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>***************************************************************************************<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<h2>ANTOINE D\u2019AGATA | A CONVERSATION WITH THE PROVOCATIVE SOCIAL DOCUMENTARIAN<\/h2>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<div>WRITTEN BY:\u00a0MATTHEW BEDARD<\/div>\n<p>Original Post:\u00a0http:\/\/flaunt.com\/fob\/110\/antoine-d%E2%80%99agata-conversation-provocative-social-documentarian<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<div id=\"node-315\">\n<div><\/div>\n<div>The work of french photographer antoine D\u2019Agata examines the fragile, often merciless, spaces between reality and its hegemonic interpretation. Drawn from his own physical immersion into global underworlds of prostitution, drug addiction, and violence, D\u2019Agata\u2019s intimately graphic retrievals are the product of new photo-documentary. Born in Marseilles in 1961, D\u2019Agata left France to study at the International Center of Photography in New York in 1990. His images have been published in the books Insomnia, Vortex, and Stigma and Agonie, and he has exhibited at galleries and festivals worldwide. D\u2019Agata recently returned from Asia for an opening at Galer\u00eda Rita Castellote in Madrid and will participate in a workshop in Fez, Morocco this October for 1000 Words Photography, an online magazine based in London. Here, he speaks to spectatorship as a kind of social cancer, and the complexity of social politics within the interiors of Asia\u2019s sex and drug trade. What, to you, composes the ideal photographic subject? One cannot apprehend reality without being involved physically, without inhaling entirely, or nourishing the liberty to act, to unveil desire or lack thereof, to envision violence. The art accomplice impoverishes reality: if the photographer condemns himself to passivity, is satisfied to observe, to analyze, to denounce, to sublimate, to comment, the resulting photo practices a guilty contemplation. I cross my own limits and the ones of reality, and find a vague space between where the bodies burst, flow, crash, penetrate themselves, and invade themselves in a tentacular mass of flesh. Do you think art can be exploitative? The contemporary proliferation of pictures aims to regulate and neutralize the brutal instinct of the masses\u2013through discernment and free agency. Anguish and oppression are born of abundance. The same can be said of stereotypical pictures, which are symptoms of complicity: soft, loose, cynical. They water us in speech, conventions, clich\u00e9s. This kindness allows them to abuse a privileged position and cross barriers without ramifications on their social, geographic, or emotional strata. How has your photographic immersion to varying kinds of underworlds affected your interpretation of cultural norms? How about in relation to contemporary photography? After twelve years of broken wandering, the photographic effort was born, inspired by the marginalized persons that reinforced me in the time of many years\u2019 solitude. The photograph was the only alternative to the emotional and social autism I took refuge in. I photograph and I live with individuals that do not have a similar power of choice. In turn, my art has the social characteristics of a pathology regulated by a severe ethics: direction. My relations with the prostitutes of Cambodia are based on a common addiction to methamphetamine. These women are the prototype of the new proletariat in a world where frantic sexual consumerism has replaced desire and memory. Their body is the strategic receptacle of the capitalist who desires the fleeting passion of the flesh. Paradoxically, the prostitutes\u2019 compulsive pleasure, their narcotic lucidity, creates survival in a parallel economy, new zones of shadow, which undermines the foundations of the system\u2013they prefer vice to poverty. My action is restricted, coherent, fitting, like a virus that insidiously introduces itself to a foreign body. I advance the obscurity. I risk destruction because my life only feels validated by the interpretations that I provoke. Still, an artistic practice cannot be justified in terms of its results. Describe your attraction to depravity, or pain, or abuse? Years of slow and reasoned self-destruction, of narcotic experimentations, of urban survival, of liaisons with prostitutes, has provoked in me a slow process of maturation on these questions. One cannot invent a destiny without developing an immunity to stereotypical morals. But still, the wording of the question is insidious. The social designation of what is indecent is an arbitrary classification that allows the system to perpetuate itself. What you designate as depravity was always, for me, an emancipatory tool. I learn every day to question prohibition and transgression. Pornography is no longer transgressive. Do you identify with any cultural figures past\/ present who similarly immerse themselves in stigmatized, misunderstood, subversive, or illegal lifestyles for their art? Certain artists and writers who\u2019ve fought to preserve in their work a fragile balance between intelligence and madness, rage and love, beauty and horror. Francis Bacon, Guy Debord, Antonin Artaud, Louis- Ferdinand C\u00e9line are references, but I fight to protect myself from modern culture inflation\u2013contemporary art astonishes me with its harmlessness, its resignation, its impregnated ideologies of capitalist production. On the tracks of those that have preceded me, I try to create new forms of excess as a strategic statement against a totalitarian enemy. Despite increased information and exposure on the drug and prostitution issues in Asia, what hasn\u2019t the public learned of these worlds? South Asia is an immense and inexhaustible sexual market. The American soldiers\u2019 inalienable right of pleasure first\u2014Western bourgeois later\u2014has only accelerated the process. Growing cities have allowed the propagation of new artificial drugs, the appearance of more dangerous, but easier to obtain, substances. The Yaba, the Ice, are everywhere. In devastated Cambodia, as elsewhere, these molecular addictions cancel the need for sleep, lessen fatigue. The effects are not hallucinogenic but provoke a precision and concentration of thoughts close to obsession and paranoia. The uniform consumption gives rise to a slow unselfishness. I am, in turn, eager predator and fascinated witness. My photographs have the innocence to believe that it is possible to hold together all the paradoxes that clatter in the margins of the modern world, to confront them without diverting the gaze. What is beautiful? It\u2019s only a vocabulary question. I see beauty only in the immense pain and the fleeting passion of the destinies I glimpse. Beauty remains in the capacity to surpass the conditions imposed upon us. What\u2019s going to happen to the human race in the next 50 years? The concentration of wealth will increase and become unbearable. Bankruptcies, poverty, exclusion, and unemployment will progress inevitably. The dominating possessors of strength\u2013the actors, the heads of businesses and states, will do what they can to rediscover a balance. But the immediate future belongs to those at the loose ends, the infamous communities. This new class will live in the lucid expectation of death, of erotic intensity. This desire will generate an energy that does not exclude a kind of violence. A time of conscience comes after one of outburst. What is on your schedule for the coming year? Without a base, I continue to be nomadic. My next destination is Phnom Penh. I will continue to go to the heart of the sensations, to observe the extinction of breath, the nervous system, the wear of organs. And to find the pictures, the language, and the necessary strategies to oppose the many falsifications which propagate death.<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>*******************************************************************************************<\/div>\n<div><\/div>\n<div>\n<p><strong>ON THE ROAD WITH ANTOINE D\u2019AGATA<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Few words from David Alan harvey\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040\/http:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/antoine.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040im_\/http:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/antoine.jpg\" alt=\"antoine\" width=\"625\" height=\"625\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Most of you seem to like the conversations I have with editors, curators, and photographers. Bill Hunt was our last conversation still up and Jim Estrin from the New York Times Lens Blog will be next. Following will be Susan Meiselas as curator\/photographer and champion of the Magnum Foundation supporting photographers with serious projects no matter how affiliated. There will be surprise conversations along the way. As now.<\/p>\n<p>Now I am literally on the road with Antoine D\u2019Agata with whom, in the moment above depicted, am sharing both beer and vodka in our Motel 6 in Bismarck , North Dakota. We are part of Magnum\u2019s Looking For America project. To be a major exhibition and book. Some of our colleagues at this very moment are in Rochester , New York doing Postcards From America which is a project within the larger America project.\u00a0<a title=\"Postcards from America\" href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040\/http:\/\/postcardsfromamerica.tumblr.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">postcardsfromamerica.tumblr.com<\/a>\u00a0Yes, I am confused too. But no worries. Trust me, it will all come down in a good way and with our best work all coming together in print and on the wall.<\/p>\n<p>So Antoine and I are headed for a story called (by me) BIG MEN LOOK FOR BIG OIL\u2026.In about an hour we will get into our lumbering camper van and head for a town with a lot of rich people who have no place to live. Hence the camper. Williston , N Dakota struck oil. The wild wild west. A bunch of men making a lot of money and sleeping in their cars. Williston was not ready for this boom boom boom.<\/p>\n<p>My story will be sort of an interview with Antoine , who flew from Paris yesterday, and my own pictures from Williston. Or not. We joked last night , towards the end of a bottle of Grey Goose , how funny it would be if we never got out of this Motel 6. Did the story , a story, of a motel on the highway. However, I think we will move on. Curiosity.<\/p>\n<p>Panos Skoulidas, from Burn comment section fame, and who started with Alec Soth and Jim Goldberg and Susan Meiselas on the original Postcards project which started in San Antonio is driving the van, helping me with computer stuff, and shooting video and doing his own record making.<\/p>\n<p>The whole thing is crazy of course. In seven days I have to be in Australia for my Rio opening. Nobody in their right mind would be doing THIS now. Yes, exactly.<\/p>\n<p>Well, come along with us. I will post some stuff here. Panos will too.<br \/>\nCheck out the Magnum Tumblr (<a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20160411161040\/http:\/\/lookingforamerica2012.tumblr.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">http:\/\/lookingforamerica2012.tumblr.com<\/a>) for more and well one way or another we will bring you a story. Not sure what story but a story for sure.<\/p>\n<p>Ask Antoine a question. Or any of us. If we do not answer right away, it will be an internet issue. Ok road trip about to happen. In pursuit of THE TRUTH.<\/p>\n<p>Alec Soth may have said it best in an email to me. \u201cNorth Dakota might not be ready for Antoine and you\u201d.<\/p>\n<p>Stay tuned.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201c\u2026\u00a0I don\u2019t believe in photography as art or a job or anything. I think of photography as a language and I think a language should be used to speak, to say what you have to say. So the only things I have to say about my life and what I know about the world, is &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/journal\/compiled-interviews-antoine-dagata\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Compiled Interviews: ANTOINE D\u2019AGATA&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1232,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,6],"tags":[12,14,19,22,35,38,42,46,55,71,82,175,174],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1535,"href":"https:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255\/revisions\/1535"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sayedasifmahmud.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}